"Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 31 of 34)
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"In smart society men are jealous of one another after the fashion of women."
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"Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit."
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"A husband can commit no greater blunder than to discuss his wife, if she is virtuous, with his mistress; unless it be to mention his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife."
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"In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can."
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"Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault."
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"We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing."
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"Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest."
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"Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage."
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"For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life."
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"Though your vulgarian does not readily admit that feelings can change overnight, certainly two lovers often part far more abruptly than they came together."
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"We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men."
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"The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool."
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"Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity."
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"Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects."
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"Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture."
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"Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole."
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"What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?"
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"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."
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"The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study."
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