Honore de Balzac Quotes

It's either love or hate with me. People really can hate me.

Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. The fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor.

Of all things known to mortals, wine is the most powerful and effectual for exciting and inflaming the passions of mankind, being common fuel to them all.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.

Hot hate is twin brother to hot love.

yes, Wagner and the storm intermix with the wine as nights like this run up my wrists and up into my head and back down into the gut

When a man is in love very little is enough to throw him into despair and as little to enhance his joy to the utmost.

We can always hate that which we loved, and with a fire as great as our love once was.

Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love.

It is nevertheless a game of considerable passion, either of the explosive type, or that which burns inwardly and sears the soul.

Let every emotion be capable becoming an intoxication to you. If what you eat fails to make you drunk, it is because you are not hungry enough.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Passion often makes fools of the wisest men and gives the silliest wisdom.

The language of love letters is the same as suicide notes.

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate. I hate murderously.

When you are in anger, in passion, violent, aggressive, you feel a crystallized ego within you. Whenever you are in love, in compassion, it is not there.

Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness.

What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.

There is a passion in you that scares me.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

The problem with being passionately in love ... is that it deprives you of too much sleep.

Wine and youth are fire upon fire.

It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.

O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with passion would I shake the world.