Honore de Balzac Art Quotations

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

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

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

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

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

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.