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
role-models envy emulation
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
forgiveness bears debtors
Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
feelings sentiments
Nos beaux sentiments ne sont-ils pas les poe sies de la volonte ? Aren't our best feelings poetry of the will?
mean feelings charm
What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
people magic mind
When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
desire loyal doe
Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
atheist eye chance
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
doe delicacy sometimes
Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon de-cency.
women order realizing
Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
men wife chloe
Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
men order neighbor
Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.
never-quit gowns priests
Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.
men clothes tailors
Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.
clothes veils gloss
Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.