Honore de Balzac's Quotes

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

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

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

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.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

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.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

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.

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.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

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.

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

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.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

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.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

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.

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

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.