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Honore de Balzac Quotes - Page 25

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Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion.

Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion.

Honore de Balzac
Girl, Mind, Suffering

The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

Honore de Balzac
Art, Lying, Secret

In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.

Honore de Balzac
Silence, Mind, Facts

No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.

Honore de Balzac
Dog, Art, Wind

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Honore de Balzac
Art, Science, Thoughtful
Honore De Balzac (2011). “Louis Lambert”, p.36, The Floating Press

No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.

Honore de Balzac
Eye, Frozen, Made

Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.

Honore de Balzac
Mother, Fashion, Sex

We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.

Honore de Balzac
Book, Law, Rose

When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.

Honore de Balzac
Women, Talking, Storm

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

Honore de Balzac
Book, Men, July
Honore de Balzac (1901). “Cousin Betty”, p.8, Library of Alexandria

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.

Honore de Balzac
Poetry, Sorrow, Radiance

Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.

Honore de Balzac
Heart, Charity, Virtue

When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.

Honore de Balzac
Pride, Animal, Earth

Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

Honore de Balzac
Writing, Style, Thieves

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

Honore de Balzac
Book, Thinking, Skeletons
Honore de Balzac (2009). “Eugenie Grandet”, p.5, The Floating Press

No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

Honore de Balzac
Heart, Inferiority, Rivals

Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise.

Honore de Balzac
Honest, Praise, Said

When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.

Honore de Balzac
Uncles, Niece, Palaces

When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.

Honore de Balzac
Marriage, Passion, Mean

A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.

Honore de Balzac
Nature, Flower, Toads

A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.

Honore de Balzac
Heart, Despair, Costumes

The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph.

Honore de Balzac
Children, Effort, Majestic

What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

Honore de Balzac
People, Judging, Crime

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

Honore de Balzac
Heart, Exercise, Equality

Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.

Honore de Balzac
Past, Icy, Snuff

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