Honore De Balzac Quotes

Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.

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

The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.

Chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable, without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in order to gratify their fancies

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.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

Love is the poetry of the senses!

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.

No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.

When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army

The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.

Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.

Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

The man whom fate employs to awaken love in the heart of a young girl is often unaware of his work and therefore leaves it uncompleted.

Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.

With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.

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

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

When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Love which economizes is never true love.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.

Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.

Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.

No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.

The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.

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

Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.

God reveals himself unfailingly to the thoughtful seeker.

A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.

Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.

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.

The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.

Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.

He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.

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

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

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

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.

But woman brings disorder into society through passion.

Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.

The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!

He will show you how, during the springtime of life, illusions, innocent hopes, silver threads of gossamer, descend from heaven and return there without ever touching the earth.

She was white like the sands, tawny like the sands, solitary and burning like the sands.

Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity.

The fires of remorse burned in his heart, and gave him intolerable pain, the generous secret remorse which men seldom take into account when they sit in judgement upon their fellow-men; but perhaps the angels in heaven, beholding it, pardon the criminal whom our justice condemns.

The greatest joy a petty soul can taste is to dupe a great soul and catch it in a snare.

A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.

Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise.

Am fully convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence, the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady.

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

In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.

We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.

The widow employed her woman's malice to devise a system of covert persecution.

Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.

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.

I used to want to know everything, to be learned; and one thing I did learn thoroughly - I knew that I was not wanted here on earth.

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

Behind every fortune there is a crime.

All men can bear a familiar, definite misfortune better than the cruel alternations of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive joy or sorrow.

Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position.

who had not felt his daughter's heart beat against his breast for ten years, "do you want me to die of joy?

There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

So an honest man is the common enemy.

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.

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

Here comes Mamma Vauquerr, fair as a starrr; and strung up like a bunch of carrots. Aren't we suffocating ourselves a wee bit?' he asked, placing a hand on the top of her corset. 'A bit of a crush in the vestibule, here, Mamma! If we start crying, there'll be an explosion. Never mind, I'll be there to collect the bits
just like an antiquary.'
'Now, there's the language of true French gallantry,' murmured Madame Vauquer in an aside to Madame Couture.

Misfortune is a kind of talisman whose virtue consists in its power to confirm our original nature; in some men it increases their distrust and malignancy, just as it improves the goodness of those who have a kind heart.

What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.

Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one he never uses against himself.

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.

There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take

Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

Conventions are often more cruel than the law.

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.

True love is eternal, infinite and always like itself. It's always equal and pure. Without violent demonstrations: It is seen with white hairs and is always young at heart.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.

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.

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.

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.

Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.

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

In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.

Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

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.

A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.