Honore de Balzac Quotes (137 Quotes)

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

When a husband and wife have got each other, the devil only knows which has got the other.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

I prefer thought to action, an idea to an event, reflection to activity.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

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

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

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

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

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

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

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

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

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.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.

Write your masterpieces And do not forget that in our profession there is no middle state you must be kingor be only a laborer.

It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

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

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.

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

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

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

The more one judges, the less one loves.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.

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.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.

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.