Honore de Balzac Quotes (137 Quotes)


    One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

    A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

    Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

    When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.



    To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

    Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

    Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!


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

    Hatred is the vice of narrow souls they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

    Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.






    We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

    Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

    It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to produce an occasional bon mot.

    When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

    Evil is a form of good, of which the results are not immediately manifest.

    To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.

    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.

    There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

    The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

    Believe everything you hear said of the world nothing is too impossibly bad.

    Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.



    But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.


    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.

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


    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.

    Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

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


    Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

    The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.


    Physically, a man is a man for a much longer time than a woman is a woman.

    For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.


    The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

    There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.


    A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

    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.


    More Honore de Balzac Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Love - Man - Woman - Time - Passion - Life - Society & Civilization - World - Crime - Mothers - Power - Mind - Pleasure - Art - Soul - Genius - Thought & Thinking - Friendship - Law & Regulation - View All Honore de Balzac Quotations

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    Paulo Coelho - Ernest Hemingway - Nathaniel Hawthorne - Naguib Mahfouz - Katherine Dunn - James Clavell - Jack Higgins - Anne Rice - Alistair Maclean - Aldous Huxley


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