Honore de Balzac
Honore de Balzac
Honoré de Balzacbal.zak], born Honoré Balzac, 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 May 1799
CountryFrance
cat blood maids
Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.
men done doe
Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.
punishment expectations soul
With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.
book men paris
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.
book thinking skeletons
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.
heart charity virtue
Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.
energy charity
Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
impossible virtue
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.
daughter children ambition
Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
compassion littles criminals
Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.
eye starlight virgins
Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes.
fame wells desirable
To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier.
horse knowledge medicine
In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
fashion good-man littles
When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?