Honore Balzac Quotes & Sayings

Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice. — Honore De Balzac

In order not to make him a fixed idea, a regret, a struggle, - three things which poison life. — Honore De Balzac

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

A husband and wife found themselves in love with each other for the first time after twenty-seven years of marriage. — Honore De Balzac

Happiness has no history and the story tellers of all lands have understood this so well that the words "they are happy" are the end pf every love tale. — Honore De Balzac

Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will. — Honore De Balzac

There is nothing original; all is reflected light. — Honore De Balzac

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally. — Honore De Balzac

Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it. — Honore De Balzac

Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. — Honore De Balzac

The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings. — Honore De Balzac

Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit. — 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

Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike. — 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

I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. — Honore De Balzac

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband. — Honore De Balzac

To speak of love is to make love. — Honore De Balzac

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

Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion. — Honore De Balzac

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

When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more? — Honore De Balzac

Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found. — Honore De Balzac

Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes. — Honore De Balzac

The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius. — Honore De Balzac

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives. — Honore De Balzac

On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts. — Honore De Balzac

Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world
the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion? — Honore De Balzac

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race. — Honore De Balzac

Our Father in heaven is surely on the side of fathers on earth who love their children. — Honore De Balzac

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman. — Honore De Balzac

Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy. — Honore De Balzac

Life cannot go on without much forgetting. — Honore De Balzac

The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times. — Honore De Balzac

...a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that's what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again.... I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite. — Honore De Balzac

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

Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things. — Honore De Balzac

If you decide to join up with me, I want it to be because you're making a rational choice, not because you've been pushed by passion or despair. — Honore De Balzac

However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors. — 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

A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life — Honore De Balzac

If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows. — Honore De Balzac

Fathers must always be giving if they would be happy themselves; always giving - they would not be fathers else. — Honore De Balzac

Kindness steers no easy course. Attributing it to character, we seldom recognize the secret efforts of a noble heart, whereas we reward really wicked people for the evil they refrain from committing. — Honore De Balzac

Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire. — Honore De Balzac

When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle. — Honore De Balzac

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind. — Honore De Balzac

Temperament is the thermometer of character. — 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

Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice. — 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

When women love us they forgive everything. — Honore De Balzac

Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones. — Honore De Balzac

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. — Honore De Balzac

Was she acting entirely consciously? No: women are always sincere, even in the midst of their most shocking duplicities, because it is always some natural emotion which dominates them. Perhaps, having given this young man such a hold on her, by having openly demonstrated her affection for him, Delphine was merely responding to a sense of personal dignity, which led her either to revoke any concessions she might have made or, at least, to enjoy suspending them. Even at the very moment when passion seizes her, it is perfectly natural for a Parisian woman to delay her final fall, as a way of testing the heart of the man into whose hands she is about to deliver herself and her future! — Honore De Balzac

Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence. — Honore De Balzac

A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers. — 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

A married woman is a slave whom one must put on a throne. — Honore De Balzac

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness. — 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

I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree. — Honore De Balzac

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt. — Honore De Balzac

If only I could bear all your sorrows for you! . . . Ah! you were so happy when you were little and still with me - — Honore De Balzac

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy. — Honore De Balzac

It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils. — Honore De Balzac

A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry. — Honore De Balzac

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

Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune. — Honore De Balzac

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities. — Honore De Balzac

Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought. — Honore De Balzac

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability. — Honore De Balzac

Our greatest fears lie in anticipation. — Honore De Balzac

I belong to the opposition party, which is called life. — Honore De Balzac

Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing. — 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

Necessity is often the spur to genius. — Honore De Balzac

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman. — Honore De Balzac

One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love. — Honore De Balzac

For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life. — Honore De Balzac

The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument. — Honore De Balzac

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

Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands. — Honore De Balzac

So often it happens that this one or that stands condemned by the social laws that govern family relations; and yet there are peculiar circumstances in the case, differences of temperament, divergent interests, innumerable complications of family life that excuse the apparent offence. — Honore De Balzac

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven. — Honore De Balzac

The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness. — Honore De Balzac

Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness. — Honore De Balzac

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

One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened. — Honore De Balzac

A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart. — Honore De Balzac

Other women bow their heads and suffer in silence. They go on living, mortally wounded but resigned, weeping often but with no desire to strike back against the person who has injured them, praying for him and cherishing their memories until their last breath. That is love, true love, the love the angels know ... — Honore De Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. — Honore De Balzac

Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile. — 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

Love knows nothing of modesty. — Honore De Balzac

Cruelty and fear shake hands together. — Honore De Balzac

Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word. — 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