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Quotes by Honore de Balzac

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
– Honore de Balzac
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
– Honore de Balzac
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
– Honore de Balzac
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
– Honore de Balzac
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
– Honore de Balzac
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
– Honore de Balzac
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
– Honore de Balzac
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
– Honore de Balzac
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
– Honore de Balzac
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
– Honore de Balzac
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
– Honore de Balzac
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
– Honore de Balzac
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
– Honore de Balzac
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
– Honore de Balzac
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
– Honore de Balzac
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
– Honore de Balzac
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
– Honore de Balzac
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
– Honore de Balzac
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
– Honore de Balzac
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
– Honore de Balzac
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
– Honore de Balzac
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
– Honore de Balzac
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
– Honore de Balzac
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
– Honore de Balzac
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
– Honore de Balzac
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
– Honore de Balzac
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
– Honore de Balzac
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
– Honore de Balzac
The more you judge, the less you love.
– Honore de Balzac
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
– Honore de Balzac
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
– Honore de Balzac
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
– Honore de Balzac
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
– Honore de Balzac
The man who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart! --this is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind.
– Honore de Balzac
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments or from their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as a skeleton of an ichthyosaur suggests an entire creation. Everything is deducible, everything is linked. The cause allows one to guess the effect, just as each effect allows one to reconstruct a cause. The scientist can resuscitate in this manner even the warts of ancient times. From this comes without doubt the prodigious interest that an architectural description can inspire when the writer's fantasy is faithful to its basic elements. Cannot each person reattach it to its past by rigorous deductions? And as for man, does not the past singularly resemble the future? Tell him what was and is this not almost always the same thing as telling him what will be?
– Honore de Balzac
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
– Honore de Balzac
Anybody who would like to travel as an archaeologist of mores and observe men instead of rocks could find an image of the century of Louis XV in some village in Provence, that of Louis XIV in Poitou, that of even more remote times in the far reaches of Brittany. Most of these cities have fallen from some splendor that historians, more preoccupied with dates than customs, no longer speak of, but whose memory lives on, such as in Brittany, where the national character scarcely accepts the forgetting of what this country is fundamentally about. . . All [of these cities] have their primitive character.
– Honore de Balzac
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.
– Honore de Balzac
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
– Honore de Balzac
Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect without esteem they cannot exist esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
– Honore de Balzac
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
– Honore de Balzac
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
– Honore de Balzac
What is art? Nature concentrated.
– Honore de Balzac
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
– Honore de Balzac
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
– Honore de Balzac
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
– Honore de Balzac
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
– Honore de Balzac
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
– Honore de Balzac
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
– Honore de Balzac
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
– Honore de Balzac
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom to serve all, but love only one.
– Honore de Balzac
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
– Honore de Balzac
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
– Honore de Balzac
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
– Honore de Balzac
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
– 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
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
– Honore de Balzac
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
– Honore de Balzac
Power is action the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
– Honore de Balzac
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
– Honore de Balzac
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
– Honore de Balzac
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
– Honore de Balzac
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
– Honore de Balzac
Love is the poetry of the senses.
– Honore de Balzac
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
– Honore de Balzac
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
– Honore de Balzac
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.
– Honore de Balzac
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
– Honore de Balzac
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
– Honore de Balzac
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
– Honore de Balzac
Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.
– Honore de Balzac
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
– Honore de Balzac
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
– Honore de Balzac
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
– Honore de Balzac
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.
– Honore de Balzac
A young bride is like a plucked flower but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
– Honore de Balzac
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
– Honore de Balzac
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
– Honore de Balzac
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
– Honore de Balzac