Balzac Quotes

No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love
how can there be any separate concerns in that case? ~ Honore De Balzac

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. ~ Honore De Balzac

There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it. ~ Honore De Balzac

What can I do, I like Balzac better than Dickens, forgive me. ~ Franco Moretti

Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle. ~ Honore De Balzac

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 ~ Honore De Balzac

What is art? Nature concentrated. ~ 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

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. ~ Honore De Balzac

As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature
in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing
he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural. ~ Honore De Balzac

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance. ~ Honore De Balzac

Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret. ~ Honore De Balzac

Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion. ~ Honore De Balzac

It is one of the most detestable habits of a Liliputian mind to credit other people with its own malignant pettiness. ~ Honore De Balzac

We may scale cliffs; but to tramp forever in the mud is another thing. ~ Honore De Balzac

With monuments as with men, position means everything. ~ Honore De Balzac

Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps. ~ Honore De Balzac

There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower. ~ Honore De Balzac

Modesty is the conscience of the body. ~ Honore De Balzac

An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities. ~ Honore De Balzac

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption. ~ Honore De Balzac

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa. ~ Honore De Balzac

Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely? ~ Honore De Balzac

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. ~ Honore De Balzac

Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force? ~ Honore De Balzac

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing. ~ Honore De Balzac

Ah!' said Michel, tempted, 'you have modern poems?'
'Of course. For instance, Martillac's 'Electric Harmonies,' which won a prize last year from the Academic of Sciences, and Monsieur de Pulfasse's 'Meditations on Oxygen;' and we have the 'Poetic Parallelogram,' and even the 'Decarbonated Odes ... '
Michel couldn't bear hearing another word and found himself outside again, stupefied and overcome. Not even this tiny amount of art had escaped the pernicious influence of the age! Science, Chemistry, Mechanics had invaded the realm of poetry! 'And such things are read,' he murmured as he hurried through the streets, ' perhaps even bought! And signed by the authors and placed on the shelves marked 'Literature.' But not one copy of Balzac, not one work by Victor Hugo! Where can I find such things-where, if not the Library ... ~ Jules Verne

Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones. ~ Honore De Balzac

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

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

Mankind are not perfect, but one age is more or less hypocritical than another, and then simpletons say that its morality is high or low. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise. ~ Honore De Balzac

What do we know of the world, of business, or men, or life? Our fathers should think for us! ~ Honore De Balzac

The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life. ~ Jean Lucey Pratt

If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible. ~ Honore De Balzac

You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters. ~ Honore De Balzac

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years. ~ Gore Vidal

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

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why? ~ 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

Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop. ~ Honore De Balzac

In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank. ~ Honore De Balzac

The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth. ~ Honore De Balzac

Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.' ~ Honore De Balzac

there is something still more appalling than the ingratitude of daughters who have cast off their old father and wish that he were dead, and that is a rivalry between two sisters. ~ Honore De Balzac

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. ~ Honore De Balzac

Our greatest fears lie in anticipation. ~ Honore De Balzac

Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense. ~ Honore De Balzac

However, she wouldn't be the first person to mistrust her nearest and dearest yet confide in the first stranger who comes along: a strange but true quirk of behaviour, whose root is easily traced to the human heart. Some people perhaps have nothing left to gain from those they live with; having revealed the emptiness of their souls, they secretly feel themselves to be judged with deserved severity; however, as they have a powerful craving for the flattery they need but lack, or a burning desire to appear to possess qualities they do not have, they hope to take by surprise the heart and esteem of those who are strangers to them, at the risk of one day falling from grace. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state. ~ Honore De Balzac

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write. ~ Gustave Flaubert

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others
existences which the spirit alone remembers, for matter has no memory for spiritual things. ~ Honore De Balzac

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off. ~ Henry Miller

No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea. ~ Honore De Balzac

Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird. ~ 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

Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future. ~ Honore De Balzac

Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from?
[Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?] ~ Honore De Balzac

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. ~ Honore De Balzac

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and '40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music. ~ David McCullough

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. ~ Honore De Balzac

There are words which cut like steel. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

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. ~ Honore De Balzac

Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry. ~ Honore De Balzac

A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought? ~ Honore De Balzac

White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light. ~ 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

No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale. ~ Honore De Balzac

an honest man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder. ~ Honore De Balzac

He had eaten as much as a travelling actor and drunk like the sands of the desert Maxence Gilet ~ Honore De Balzac

Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting. ~ 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

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. ~ 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

As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative. ~ 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

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

Little minds find gratification for their feelings, benevolent or otherwise, by a constant exercise of petty ingenuity. ~ 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

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 most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste. ~ Honore De Balzac

Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

Nothing is as heady as the wine of misfortune. ~ Honore De Balzac

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

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