Honoré de Balzac

Generous people make bad shopkeepers .

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything familiarity.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

What is art Nature concentrated.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

No man should marry before he has studied anatomy and dissected the body of a woman.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

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

When a woman gets too old to be attractive to man, she turns to God.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves man from catching the complaint the second time.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littlenesses, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work . . . as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner . . . he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

The more he plumbed the depths of sensual pleasure, the more he emerged with grit rather than pearls.

Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.