Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Honore de Balzac Quotes. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!
1
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.
2
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
3
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.
4
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
5
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.
6
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
7
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
8
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
9
What is art? Nature concentrated.
10
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.
11
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.
12
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
13
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
14
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.
15
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.
16
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
17
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
18
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.
19
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
20
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
21
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
22
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.
23
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
24
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
25
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
26
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
27
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
28
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
29
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
30
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
31
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
32
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.
33
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
34
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
35
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
36
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
37
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
38
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
39
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
40
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
41
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
42
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
43
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
44
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.
45
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
46
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
47
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
48
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
49
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.
50
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.
51
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
52
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.
53
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
54
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
55
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.
