Balzac Paris Quotes & Sayings

The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study. — Honore De Balzac

In Paris extremes are made to meet by passion. Vice is constantly binding the rich to the poor, the great to the mean. — Honore De Balzac

The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine. — Honore De Balzac

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard. — Honore De Balzac

Cities have to realize that whatever the federal government is going to do, it's not going to be enough. And cities that proactively take control of their own quality of life initiatives are going to be the cities that ultimately attract the highly talented young people and create the jobs. — Mick Cornett

It's almost worth the Great Depression to learn how little our big men know. — Will Rogers

Fan reactions are crazy sometimes. — OMI

Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from?
[Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?] — Honore De Balzac

Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant. — Honore De Balzac

In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank. — Honore De Balzac

I am 90. I can work day or night. I'm the same guy, but the polls show the effect of age. That's the issue. — Ralph Hall

I have my kids every Friday through Monday, and I don't leave them the whole time I have them. — Travis Barker

In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady. — Honore De Balzac

In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted. — Honore De Balzac

How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage? — Barack Obama

To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely. — Honore De Balzac

SHADOW KNIGHT'S MATE is a compelling story, extremely well-written and alarmingly plausible. Jay Brandon does for politics what Dan Brown did for religion. — Sharyn McCrumb

If it wasn't for this person's privacy, I'd be able to talk pretty freely about this subject on a personal level. The record's about not her. It's about my struggles through years of dealing with the aftermath of lost love and longing and just mediocrity and just bad news, like life stuff. And in the [record], where the title comes from, the lyrics are actually a conversation between me and another girl, not this Emma character. — Justin Vernon

But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created. — Stephen Hawking

Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue. — Honore De Balzac

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society? — Honore De Balzac

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills ... — William Butler Yeats

It is no accident that propels people like us to Paris. Paris is simply an artificial stage, a revolving stage that permits the spectator to glimpse all phases of the conflict. Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil: one dreams back to Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Minsk. Vienna is never more Vienna than in Paris. Everything is raised to apotheosis. The cradle gives up its babes and new ones take their places. You can read here on the walls where Zola lived and Balzac and Dante and Strindberg and everybody who ever was anything. Everyone has lived here some time or other.Nobody dies here ... — Henry Miller

You will only be loved and respected if you love and respect yourself. Never try to please everyone; if you do, you will be respected by no one. — Paulo Coelho

The folkish philosophy of life must succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men no longer are concerned with breeding dogs, horses, and cats, but in elevating man himself. — Adolf Hitler

Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry. — Honore De Balzac

I'm just like any other man. I understand why people become reclusive. One of my weaknesses is that I sometimes allow people in that shouldn't be in my life. — Peter Loftin

Will anyone understand it outside Paris? That is open to doubt. The special features of this scene, full of local colour and observations, can only be appreciated in the area lying between the heights of Montmartre and the hills of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of flaking plasterwork and gutters black with mud; a valley full of suffering that is real, and of joy that is often false, where life is so hectic that it takes something quite extraordinary to produce feelings that last. — Honore De Balzac

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor. — Max Von Sydow

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris. — Honore De Balzac

Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness. — Honore De Balzac