Honore de Balzac Secret Quotations

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.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.

With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.

Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.

As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.

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.