Quotes from Honore de Balzac

Os excessos em todas as coisas modelam os corpos segundo suas características. A bebedeira, como o estudo, engorda mais aos gordos e emagrece aos magros.

Um grande amor é um crédito aberto a uma potência tão voraz, que o momento da falência chega sempre.

Dac? lumina e prima dragoste a vie?ii, dragostea nu este oare lumina inimii?

Nothing could be more forlorn than the manner in which Madame Vauthier had furnished the two rooms. It seemed as though the woman let rooms with the express purpose that no one should stay in them. Evidently the bed, chairs, tables, bureau, secretary, curtains, came from forced sales at auction, articles massed together in lots as having no separate intrinsic value.

Give what name you like to my presentiments, but I am afraid that my happiness will be paid for by some horrible catastrophe.

She is right," said the baroness. "We are sent into the world to marry." "Do you encourage her in disobedience?" said the baron to his wife, who, terrified by the word, now changed to marble. "Refusing to obey an unjust order is not disobedience," said Ginevra.

Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity.

Life cannot go on without much forgetting!

Does a creature of fashion not need a fine mind?" asked the Polish count. "More than anything else, she must have very fine taste," answered Madame d'Espard.

And finally, if he sleeps, he sleeps apace, and hurries through his slumber as he does his life.

Father Goriot knocked up against me, and his parcel was as hard as iron. What is the old fellow up to, I wonder? He is as good as a plaything for the rest of them; they can never let him alone; but he is a good man, all the same, and worth more than all of them put together.

To be faithful to an ideal of virtue! A heroic martyrdom! Pshaw! every one believes in virtue, but who is virtuous? Nations have made an idol of Liberty, but what nation on the face of the earth is free?

On the morrow of my wedding we shall be parted for a long time; but, Daniel, you are of stuff to understand me. Friendship can subsist in the absence of the friend.

Os três filhos apressaram-se então a contar à mãe assombrada seu encantador projeto, entregando-se a uma dessas loucas conversas de família em que a gente se apraz em armazenar sonhos e semear os projetos, em gozar de antemão todas as alegrias.

You will find the signs of good taste all around you; luxury is her constant companion, replaced as necessary

Misers have no belief in a future life; the present is their all in all. This thought casts a terrible light upon our present epoch, in which, far more than at any former period, money sways the laws and politics and morals. Institutions, books, men, and dogmas, all conspire to undermine belief in a future life, — a belief upon which the social edifice has rested for eighteen hundred years.

He felt the brusque transition from his poetic Paris to the dumb and arid province; and when, coming downstairs, he chanced to see Monsieur Hochon cutting slices of bread for each person, he understood, for the first time in his life, Moliere's Harpagon.

En las grandes crisis, el corazón se curte o se rompe.

I even felt doubts at times as to his sex. If all usurers are like this one, I maintain that they belong to the neuter gender.

Güte ist nicht ohne Klippen: man schreibt sie dem Charakter zu und erkennt die stille Bemühung einer schönen Seele nur selten an. Die Bösen dagegen belohnt man für das Böse, das sie nicht tun.

Admiration, gratitude, a sort of hope for better days, were mingled with pride at having such a pretty daughter.

Have you a mind to marry? You hang a stone around your neck; for if you marry for money, what becomes of our exalted notions of honor and so forth? You might as well fly in the face of social conventions at once. Is it nothing to crawl like a serpent before your wife, to lick her mother's feet, to descend to dirty actions that would sicken swine — faugh! — never mind if you at least make your fortune.

Unos cazan la dote y otros el capital, aquellos pescan conciencias y estos venden a sus víctimas atadas de pies y manos. El que regresa con el morral lleno es respetado, festejado, aceptado en la buena sociedad.

That fellow was partly the cause of his mother's death. He chose to be a commercial traveller; and the trade just suited him, for he was no sooner in the house than he wanted to be out of it; he couldn't keep in one place, and he wouldn't learn anything. All I ask of God is that I may die before he dishonors my name. Those who have no children lose many pleasures, but they escape great sufferings.