Quotes from Honore de Balzac

If ye were of this world the world would love you, but I have chosen you out of the world; be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Les fruits de l'amour passent vite, ceux de l'art sont immortels.

Quelque mal que l'on te dise du monde, crois?le ! il n'y a pas de Juvénal qui puisse en peindre l'horreur couverte d'or et de pierreries.

I left, stifling my generous impulse, for I have often observed that while a charitable act may do no harm to the benefactor, it is death to the one who receives it.

As soon as misfortune overtakes you there is always a friend ready to come and announce it, and probe your heart with a dagger while bidding you admire the hilt.

Reading brings us unknown friends.

in order not to make him a fixed idea, a regret, a struggle,—three things which poison life.

The rout, that dreary review of fashionable fineries, that parade of well-dressed self-infatuations, is one of those English inventions currently mechanifying the other nations. England seems determined to see the entire world bored just as she is, and just as bored as she.

build no barricades when no one attacks you. Don't excite tempests of heart and conscience merely to pacify your conscience and quiet your heart, now ruffled only by a tiny breeze.

Today, when everything is intellectual competition, a man must be capable of sitting in his chair at a desk for forty-eight hours straight just as a general had to sit for two days in his saddle on horseback.

Ça se croit grand parce que ça fait de petites choses avec de grands capitaux.

This short novel is the opening work of the Scènes de la vie privée, the first volume of La Comédie humaine. The novella was originally entitled Gloire et Malheur (Glory and Misfortune) when it was written in 1829. Published by Mame-Delaunay in the following year, it was followed by four revised editions. The final edition was published by Furne in 1842, appearing under the title of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote.

In Paris extremes are made to meet by passion. Vice is constantly binding the rich to the poor, the great to the mean.

Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.

La ilusión es una memoria convertida en deseo.

The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to bear, and it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved.

Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

Le journalisme est un enfer, un abîme d'iniquités, de mensonges, de trahisons, que l'on ne peut traverser et d'où l'on ne peut sortir pur, que protégé comme Dante par le divin laurier de Virgile.

Like the moth whose feet are caught in the molten wax of a candle, Rouget rapidly used up his remaining energy.

After the snows of Siberia, a man may well find merit in these black eyes of mine, which, as you used to say, ripened any fruit that I gazed upon.

En se résignant, le malheureux consomme son malheur.

Mademoiselle de Fontaine had an ideal standard which was to be the model. A young man who at the first glance did not fulfil the requisite conditions did not even get a second look.

The most national of all sentiments in France is vanity. The wounded vanity of the many induced a thirst for Equality; though, as the most ardent innovator will some day discover, Equality is an impossibility.

Monsieur," said Madame de Godollo, "we Hungarians, primitive people and almost savages that we are, have a saying that when our door is open both sides of it are opened wide; when we close it it is double-locked and bolted.