Honore De Balzac

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.

Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.

Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work.

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.

Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.

To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.

Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.

All human beings go through a previous life... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?

Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.

Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.

The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers.

There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.