Honore de Balzac Art Quotations

Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.

A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.

The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.

Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.

The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.

The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.

Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.

When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.

Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves.

A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.

Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.

Kindness steers no easy course. Attributing it to character, we seldom recognize the secret efforts of a noble heart, whereas we reward really wicked people for the evil they refrain from committing.

In smart society men are jealous of one another after the fashion of women.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

But also remember: if you have any genuine feelings, hide them like treasure; never let anyone so much as suspect them, or you're lost. Instead of being the executioner, you'll be the victim. And if you ever fall in love, keep that absolutely secret! Never breathe a word until you're completely sure of the person to whom you open your heart. And to protect that love, even before you feel it, learn to despise the world.

L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.

Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

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.

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.

Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.

When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.

The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.

Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.

No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.

Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.

Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.

The man whom fate employs to awaken love in the heart of a young girl is often unaware of his work and therefore leaves it uncompleted.

Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.

You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you would pull a tooth.

Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.

Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole.

When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

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.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.

Economized love is never real love.

White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.

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

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

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

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.

Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.