"Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders."
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Honore de Balzac quotes (page 33 of 34)
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"It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide."
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"He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved."
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"One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others."
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"Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world."
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"All we are is in the soul."
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"Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life's duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures."
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"And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink."
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"Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,-she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth."
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"Now literary success can only be won in solitude by persevering labor."
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"If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance."
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"My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts."
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"Let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks, the statesmen."
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"Nothing about me surprises me."
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"In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank."
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"What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life."
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"Necessity is the spur of genius."
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"Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands."
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"They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them."
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"A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other."
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