Honore de Balzac Quotes About Pleasure
-
For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?
→ -
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.
→ -
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
→ -
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
→ -
And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.
→ -
Ah! how much a mother learns from her child! The constant protection of a helpless being forces us to so strict an alliance with virtue, that a woman never shows to full advantage except as a mother. Then alone can her character expand in the fulfillment of all life's duties and the enjoyment of all its pleasures.
→ -
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
→ -
The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.
→ -
How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
→ -
It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance.
→ -
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
→ -
Nothing can afford a woman greater pleasure than to hear tender words of love. The strictest, most devout woman will listen even if she must not answer.
→ -
We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
→ -
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.
→ -
Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
→ -
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
→
Related Authors
-
Honore Daumier Printmaker -
Stendhal Writer -
Andre Gide Author -
Arthur Rimbaud Poet -
Voltaire Writer -
Alexandre Dumas Writer -
Gustave Flaubert Writer -
Guy de Maupassant Writer -
William Shakespeare Poet -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Emile Zola Writer -
Victor Hugo Poet -
Vladimir Nabokov Novelist -
Antoine de Saint-Exupery Writer -
Fyodor Dostoevsky Novelist -
Marcel Proust Novelist -
Charles Baudelaire Poet -
Leo Tolstoy Writer -
George Sand Novelist