Honore de Balzac Quotes (137 Quotes)

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

I am laughing to think what risks you take to try to find money in a desk by night where the legal owner can never find any by day.

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.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

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

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

The glory of surgeons is like that of actors, who exist only in their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

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.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

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

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

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent idealsthat is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.

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

The house is turned entirely upside down when the hen crows and the cock is silent.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, And to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.