Honore De Balzac Quotes & Sayings

The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph. — Honore De Balzac

People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply. — Honore De Balzac

Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned. — Honore De Balzac

A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one. — Honore De Balzac

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. — Honore De Balzac

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling. — Honore De Balzac

The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical. — Honore De Balzac

A lui la foi, a' elle le doute, a' elle le fardeau le plus lourd: la femme ne souffre-t-elle pas toujours pour deux? For him, faith; for her, doubt and for her theheavier load: does not the woman always suffer for both? — Honore De Balzac

If I'd had a man of my own, I'd have followed him ... down to hell. — Honore De Balzac

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him. — Honore De Balzac

The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can. — 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

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 motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one. — Honore De Balzac

She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered. — Honore De Balzac

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide. — Honore De Balzac

Life is simply what out feelings do to us. — Honore De Balzac

Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,
she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth. — 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

All human power is a compound of time and patience. — Honore De Balzac

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent. — Honore De Balzac

Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face. — Honore De Balzac

Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival. — Honore De Balzac

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred. — Honore De Balzac

The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes. — Honore De Balzac

The savage has only impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at a time. — Honore De Balzac

During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo. — Honore De Balzac

Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love. — Honore De Balzac

Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises. — Honore De Balzac

People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are. — Honore De Balzac

Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues. — Honore De Balzac

All we are is in the soul. — Honore De Balzac

Novelty is both delightful and deceptive. — Honore De Balzac

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being,
and the expansion of a single being, even to God — Honore De Balzac

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love. — Honore De Balzac

In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only. — Honore De Balzac

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. — Honore De Balzac

Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth. — Honore De Balzac

When in Turkey, do as the turkeys do. — 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

Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims. — Honore De Balzac

To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier. — Honore De Balzac

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears. — Honore De Balzac

It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in
the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman
dancing. — Honore De Balzac

By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions. — Honore De Balzac

To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely. — Honore De Balzac

Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God. — Honore De Balzac

There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find out what the world is - an assemblage of fools and knaves. — 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

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable. — Honore De Balzac

The union of a want and a sentiment. — Honore De Balzac

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice. — Honore De Balzac

Today, when everything is intellectual competition, a man must be capable of sitting in his chair at a desk for forty-eight hours straight just as a general had to sit for two days in his saddle on horseback. — Honore De Balzac

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God. — Honore De Balzac

Our most natural feelings are those we are loath to confess, and fatuity is among them. — 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

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything. — Honore De Balzac

Ah! Lord God in heaven! how ill Thy world is ordered! Thou hast a Son, if what they tell us is true, and yet Thou leavest us to suffer so through our children. — Honore De Balzac

Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man. — Honore De Balzac

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society. — Honore De Balzac

Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity? — Honore De Balzac

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought. — Honore De Balzac

The rout, that dreary review of fashionable fineries, that parade of well-dressed self-infatuations, is one of those English inventions currently mechanifying the other nations. England seems determined to see the entire world bored just as she is, and just as bored as she. — Honore De Balzac

It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it. — Honore De Balzac

It is no sin to be tempted; the wickedness lies in being overcome. — Honore De Balzac

Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage. — Honore De Balzac

God reveals himself unfailingly to the thoughtful seeker. — Honore De Balzac

An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity. — Honore De Balzac

Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks. — Honore De Balzac

Every compartment in his brain which he had thought to find so full of wit was bolted fast; he grew positively stupid. — Honore De Balzac

Conventions are often more cruel than the law. — Honore De Balzac

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane — Honore De Balzac

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain. — Honore De Balzac

What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor? — Honore De Balzac

The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool. — Honore De Balzac

The more you judge, the less you love. — Honore De Balzac

When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse. — Honore De Balzac

Cruelty and fear shake hands together. — 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

For businessmen, the world is a bale of banknotes in circulation; for most young men, it is a woman; for some women, it is a man; and for others it may be a salon, a coterie, a part of town or a whole city. — Honore De Balzac

Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal. — Honore De Balzac

The most callous of her guests admired her as young Rome applauded some gladiator who could die smiling. — Honore De Balzac

A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne. — Honore De Balzac

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience — Honore De Balzac

The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again. — Honore De Balzac

But also remember: if you have any genuine feelings, hide them like treasure; never let anyone so much as suspect them, or you're lost. Instead of being the executioner, you'll be the victim. And if you ever fall in love, keep that absolutely secret! Never breathe a word until you're completely sure of the person to whom you open your heart. And to protect that love, even before you feel it, learn to despise the world. — Honore De Balzac

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible. — Honore De Balzac

God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven. — Honore De Balzac

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. — Honore De Balzac

Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture. — Honore De Balzac

Some sentiment other than love united these two beings, and inspired with mutual anxiety their movements and their thoughts. Misery is, perhaps, the most powerful of all ties. — Honore De Balzac

Lucien took the cigar and lit it, in the Spanish fashion, from that of the priest. "He is right," Lucien thought; "there is plenty of time to kill myself. — Honore De Balzac

For avarice begins where poverty ends. — Honore De Balzac

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. — Honore De Balzac

When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary. — Honore De Balzac

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me ... to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing. — Honore De Balzac

In the desert there is everything and nothing-- God without mankind. — Honore De Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses! — Honore De Balzac

Trust no one until you are very sure of the heart to which you open your heart. Learn to mistrust every one; take every precaution for the sake of the love which does not exist as yet. — Honore De Balzac

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed. — Honore De Balzac