Honoré de Balzac quotes - page 7

Life - is it anything more than a machine to which money imparts the motion? (Honoré de Balzac)
No man would have torn himself from the comfort of a morning nap to listen to a minstrel in a jacket; none but a maid awakes to songs of love. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
"I shall succeed!" he said to himself. So says the gambler; so says the great captain; but the three words that have been the salvation of some few, have been the ruin of many more. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
The provinces are provinces; they are only ridiculous when they mimic Paris. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
There are certain wives whose confinement makes sarcastic celibates smile. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
It is certain that during the sixteenth century, and the years that preceded and followed it, poisoning was brought to a perfection unknown to modern chemistry, as history itself will prove. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was, at this period, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are now lost. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Pierrette, like all those who suffer more than they have strength to bear, kept silence.Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete, - for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
The passion, observe, which is able to reflect, gives even to ninnies, fools, and imbeciles a species of intelligence, especially in youth. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way to them. (Honoré de Balzac)
Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Girls brought up as you were, in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
In Paris the rich encounter wit ready-made, pre-digested science, and opinions already formulated, which excuse them from hand to have wit, science or opinion. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother's place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
The tiniest flower is a thought, - a life which corresponds to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant intuition. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Practice spoke its positive language to Theory whose word is always to the Future. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Crime and madness have some similarity. Seeing the prisoners of the Conciergerie in the courtyard, or seeing the mad in the garden of a nursing home, it's the same thing. Both walk around, avoiding each other, glancing at each other at least singularly, atrociously, according to their thoughts of the moment, never cheerful or serious; because they know each other or they fear each other. The expectation of a condemnation, remorse, anxieties give walkers in the courtyard a worried and a haggard look of madmen. Consummate criminals alone have an assurance which resembles the tranquility of an honest life, the sincerity of a pure conscience. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
A tear is a misfortune, a stain is a vice. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
The law is good, it is necessary, its execution is poor, and the manners judge the laws based on the manner in which they are executed. (Honoré de Balzac)
Also, they had to forget both their misery and their thought which doubled the misery. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
However the three classes of beings created by the manners are: The man who works; The man who thinks; The man who does nothing. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft. View quote
Honoré de Balzac