Quotes from Honore de Balzac

You have not much luxury here," said the judge, gravely, looking round the room. "Well, my son, if we wish to be something great, we must begin by being nothing.

All through those splendid years of travel Pons was as happy as was possible to a man with a great soul, a sensitive nature, and a face so ugly that any "success with the fair" (to use the stereotyped formula of 1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell short of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without was not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to the dissonance.

Could it be that my father, instead of spending this money in arranging a marriage for me, would have left me to die in the convent? This was the first thought to greet me on the threshold of my home.

May a society which is based solely on the power of wealth shudder as it sees the impotence of the law in dealing with the workings of a system which deifies success, and pardons every means of attaining it. May it return to the Catholic religion, for the purification of its masses through the inspiration of religious feeling, and by means of an education other than that of a lay university.

a mere nothing in your eyes, though three times the dowry of an archduchess of Austria. Bonaparte received only two hundred and fifty thousand francs with Maria-Louisa." "Maria-Louisa was the ruin of Bonaparte," muttered Mathias.

Enfin, hormis le nombre des personnages, en remplaçant le loto par le whist, et en supprimant les figures de monsieur et de madame Grandet, la sc?ne, par laquelle commence cette histoire, était ? peu pr?s la m?me que par le passé. La meute poursuivait toujours Eugénie et ses millions; mais la meute plus nombreuse aboyait mieux, et cernait sa proie avec ensemble.

Chi infatti deciderà se è spettacolo più orrendo quello dei cuori umani induriti o quello dei teschi vuoti?

Every reputation founded upon the fashion or the fancy of the hour, or upon the short-lived follies of Paris, produces its Pons. No place in the world is so inexorable in great things; no city of the globe so disdainfully indulgent in small.

In 1816 she was twenty-five years old. She knew nothing of marriage; her conception of it was wholly that of thought; she judged it in its causes instead of its effect, and saw only its objectionable side. Her superior mind refused to make the abdication by which a married woman begins that life; she keenly felt the value of independence, and was conscious of disgust for the duties of maternity.

brutally, like men who think they have to deal with a swindler or a madman — it depends on their nature. I have been buried under the dead; but now I am buried under the living, under papers, under facts, under the whole of society, which wants to shove me underground again!

In old men thus constituted the soul governs the body, and gives it strength to die erect.

To bear a child is nothing; to nourish it is birth renewed every hour.

La resignación es un suicidio cotidiano.

Ce privilege d'etre partout chez soi n'apppartient qu'aux rois, aux filles et aux voleurs

He maintained to Beatrix that love existed only by desire; that most women deceived themselves in loving; that they loved for reasons unknown to men and to themselves; that they wanted to deceive themselves, and that the best among them were artful.

Besides, women are so naively saucy, so pretty, graceful, and withal so true in lying, — they recognize so fully the utility of doing so in order to avoid in social life the violent shocks which happiness might not resist,

The first room exhales an odor for which there is no name in the language, and which should be called the odeur de pension. The damp atmosphere sends a chill through you as you breathe it; it has a stuffy, musty, and rancid quality; it permeates your clothing; after-dinner scents seem to be mingled in it with smells from the kitchen and scullery and the reek of a hospital.

Papa, me demanda-t-il, les riches sont les plus forts en ce monde ? – Oui, Ilioucha, il n'y a pas plus puissant que le riche.

Inima unei surori este un diamant de puritate, un noian de tandrete.

Circulating libraries were not as yet; if you wished to read a book, you were obliged to buy it, for which reason novels of the early part of the century were sold in numbers which now seem well-nigh fabulous to us.

under the terrible axiom that "men should have strength of character," — a masculine phrase that has caused many a woman's misery.

Mor?l?s ciešanas, kas p?rsp?j fizisk?s, allaž izraisa maz?ku ž?lumu, jo cilv?ka acij nav saskat?mas.

Married life is full of these sacred hours, which perhaps owe their indefinable charm to some vague memory of a better world. A divine radiance surely shines upon them, the destined compensation for some portion of earth's sorrows, the solace which enables man to accept life. We seem to behold a vision of an enchanted universe, the great conception of its system widens out before our eyes, and social life pleads for its laws by bidding us look to the future.

Vouloir nous brûle et pouvoir nous détruit; mais savoir laisse notre faible organisation dans un perpétuel état de calme.