Quotes from Honore de Balzac

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.

The union of a want and a sentiment.

Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!

Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.

God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker

Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.

What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.

Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.

Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.

Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.

Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.

There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding.