Honoré De Balzac: Citáty v angličtine (page 2)

Zdroj: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 2: Seraphita.
Kontext: If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment — giving to that word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others, namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe.

Zdroj: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 4: A Man of Note.
Kontext: This surface good-nature which captivates a new acquaintance and is no bar to treachery, which knows no scruple and is never at fault for an excuse, which makes an outcry at the wound which it condones, is one of the most distinctive features of the journalist. This camaraderie (the word is a stroke of genius) corrodes the noblest minds; it eats into their pride like rust, kills the germ of great deeds, and lends a sanction to moral cowardice.

Part I, Meditation III: Of the Honest Woman http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Physiology_of_Marriage/Part_1/Med_3.
Physiology of Marriage (1829)
Kontext: To saunter is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live… To saunter is to enjoy life; it is to indulge the flight of fancy; it is to enjoy the sublime pictures of misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies; it is to pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences; for the young it is to desire all, and to possess all; for the old it is to live the life of the youthful, and to share their passions.

Zdroj: A Bachelor's Establishment (1842), Ch. I.
Kontext: A grocer is drawn to his business by an attracting force quite equal to the repelling force which drives artists away from it. We do not sufficiently study the social potentialities which make up the various vocations of life. It would be interesting to know what determines one man to be a stationer rather than a baker; since, in our day, sons are not compelled to follow the calling of their fathers, as they were among the Egyptians.

Zdroj: Pierrette (1840), Ch. IV: Pierrette.
Kontext: Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts. Narrow natures expand by persecuting as much as others through beneficence; they prove their power over their fellows by cruel tyranny as others do by loving kindness; they simply go the way their temperaments drive them. Add to this the propulsion of self-interest and you may read the enigma of most social matters.

Part I, ch. XII.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
Kontext: A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.

Zdroj: A Bachelor's Establishment (1842), Ch. IX.
Kontext: There are two species of timidity, — the timidity of the mind, and the timidity of the nerves; a physical timidity, and a moral timidity. The one is independent of the other. The body may fear and tremble, while the mind is calm and courageous, or vice versa. This is the key to many moral eccentricities. When the two are united in one man, that man will be a cipher all his life.

Part I, ch. XXXI.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
Kontext: A child is tied to our heart-strings, as the spheres are linked to their creator; we cannot think of God except as a mother's heart writ large. It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part II: A Woman Without a Heart
Kontext: A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.

Les Employés http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Employ%C3%A9s [The Government Clerks] (1838), translated by James Waring; also known as Bureaucracy, or, A Civil Service Reformer.
Kontext: As routine business must always be dispatched, there is always a fluctuating number of supernumeraries who cannot be dispensed with, and yet are liable to dismissal at a moment's notice. All of these naturally are anxious to be "established clerks." And thus Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pigmies, came into the world. Possibly Napoleon retarded its influence for a time, for all things and all men were forced to bend to his will; but none the less the heavy curtain of Bureaucracy was drawn between the right thing to be done and the right man to do it. Bureaucracy was definitely organized, however, under a constitutional government with a natural kindness for mediocrity, a predilection for categorical statements and reports, a government as fussy and meddlesome, in short, as a small shopkeeper's wife.

Part I, ch. XVIII.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
Kontext: 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.

Zdroj: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 3: Seraphita - Seraphitus.
Kontext: Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world. Thus man takes note of more than he is able to explain, while the Angelic Spirit sees and comprehends. Science depresses man; Love exalts the Angel. Science is still seeking, Love has found. Man judges Nature according to his own relations to her; the Angelic Spirit judges it in its relation to Heaven. In short, all things have a voice for the Spirit.

La joie d’une mère est une lumière qui jaillit jusque sur l’avenir et le lui éclaire, mais qui se reflète sur le passé pour lui donner le charme des souvenirs.
Part I, ch. XXXI.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

La science de la mère comporte des mérites silencieux, ignorés de tous, sans parade, une vertu en détail, un dévouement de toutes les heures.
Part I, ch. XLV.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Le bonheur ne vient-il donc pas de l'âme?
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part I: The Talisman

Magnam habet cordis tranquillitatem, qui nec laudes curat, nec vituperia. — Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (ca. 1418), book II, ch. VI, paragraph 2.
Misattributed

Un an de lait suffit. Les enfants qui tettent trop deviennent des sots. Je suis pour les dictons populaires.
Part I, ch. XXXVIII.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)

Je préfère la pensée à l'action, une idée à une affaire, la contemplation au mouvement.
Louis Lambert (1832), as translated by Clara Bell

Mes avis sur vos relations avec les femmes sont aussi dans ce mot de chevalerie: Les servir toutes, n'en aimer qu'une.
Le lys dans la vallée (1836), translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, part II: First Love.