Quote

It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

Honore de Balzac

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Honore de Balzac
Age: 52 †
Born: 1799
Born: May 20
Died: 1851
Died: August 19
Art Critic
Dramaturge
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Tours
France
Balzac
Horace de Saint- Aubin
Onoreh deh Balzaḳ
Lord R'Hoone
Ônôrē de Balzaq
Jeune ceélibataire
Onore de Balzak
Honorato De Balzac
H. Balzak
Honoreé De Balzac
H. Balzac
Horace de S.- Aubin
Honoriusz Balzac
Un Jeune ceélibataire
Lord O'Rhoone
Ūnūrīh dī Balzāk
R'Hoone
Onore de Bal'zak
Hônôrê đơ Banzăc
Honore de Balzak
de. Balzac
Grief
Stripped
Ambition
Secretly
Gives
Ambitions
Start
Veils
Hope
Poems
Beautiful
Yield
May
Measure
Giving
Despair
Looms

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The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
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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.
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What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
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The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
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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!
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The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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Several sorts of memory exist in us body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
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To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.
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Nothing is as heady as the wine of misfortune.
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Vivacity is the health of the spirit.
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Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
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A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse he may be penitent and amend but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad his vileness pervades every moment of his life
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Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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