Honore de Balzac Quotes

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