Honore de Balzac quotes
Born
20 May 1799 Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France.
Died
18 August 1850.
Occupation
Novelist.
Honore de Balzac was a French novelist.
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
– Honore de Balzac
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
– Honore de Balzac
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
– Honore de Balzac
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
– Honore de Balzac
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
– Honore de Balzac
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
– Honore de Balzac
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
– Honore de Balzac
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.
– 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
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
– Honore de Balzac
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
– 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
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.
– Honore de Balzac
Love is the poetry of the senses.
– Honore de Balzac
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
– 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
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
– Honore de Balzac
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
– Honore de Balzac
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
– Honore de Balzac
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
– Honore de Balzac
The more one judges, the less one loves.
– Honore de Balzac
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
– 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
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
– Honore de Balzac
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
– Honore de Balzac
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
– Honore de Balzac
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
– 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
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
– 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
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
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
– 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
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
– Honore de Balzac
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
– Honore de Balzac
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
– Honore de Balzac