Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

Quotes

• I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

• There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

• Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion, history, art, and romance would be useless.

• Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

• All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

• The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

• Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

• Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

• First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.

• Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

• No man should marry before he has studied anatomy and dissected the body of a woman.

• The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

• This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.

• All human power is a compound of time and patience.

• Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

• Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.