Honore De Balzac Quotes & Sayings

#1. Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.

Honore De Balzac

#2. The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#4. Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

Honore De Balzac

#5. In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

Honore De Balzac

#6. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Honore De Balzac

#7. A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#10. Necessity is often the spur to genius.

Honore De Balzac

#11. The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.

Honore De Balzac

#12. Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.

Honore De Balzac

#13. Resignation is a daily suicide.

Honore De Balzac

#14. So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.

Honore De Balzac

#15. Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.

Honore De Balzac

#16. You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters.

Honore De Balzac

#17. Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.

Honore De Balzac

#18. A lui la foi, a' elle le doute, a' elle le fardeau le plus lourd: la femme ne souffre-t-elle pas toujours pour deux? For him, faith; for her, doubt and for her theheavier load: does not the woman always suffer for both?

Honore De Balzac

#19. Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves.

Honore De Balzac

#20. The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

Honore De Balzac

#21. Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#23. To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

Honore De Balzac

#24. Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Honore De Balzac

#25. We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

Honore De Balzac

#26. The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#28. True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!

Honore De Balzac

#29. A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility.

Honore De Balzac

#30. With monuments as with men, position means everything.

Honore De Balzac

#31. My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

Honore De Balzac

#32. Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being,
and the expansion of a single being, even to God

Honore De Balzac

#33. All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.

Honore De Balzac

#34. Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Honore De Balzac

#35. When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.

Honore De Balzac

#36. If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.

Honore De Balzac

#37. Nothing is as heady as the wine of misfortune.

Honore De Balzac

#38. The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.

Honore De Balzac

#39. Passion is born deaf and dumb.

Honore De Balzac

#40. For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.

Honore De Balzac

#41. For she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through - the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form,

Honore De Balzac

#42. Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.

Honore De Balzac

#43. Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.

Honore De Balzac

#44. Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.

Honore De Balzac

#45. Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.

Honore De Balzac

#46. It is no sin to be tempted; the wickedness lies in being overcome.

Honore De Balzac

#47. Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.

Honore De Balzac

#48. In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.

Honore De Balzac

#49. Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.

Honore De Balzac

#50. I am not deep, but I am very wide.

Honore De Balzac

#51. Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

Honore De Balzac

#52. Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.

Honore De Balzac

#53. Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

Honore De Balzac

#54. As a rule, only the poor are generous.

Honore De Balzac

#55. I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's improvement in himself.

Honore De Balzac

#56. 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

#57. We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

Honore De Balzac

#58. Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.'

Honore De Balzac

#59. The faint hints of color in her complexion, her tawny blond hair, her extraordinary thinness, all spoke of that unearthly grace modern poets find in the medieval statues. Had she been happy, she'd have been ravishing: happiness constitutes pure poetry, for women.

Honore De Balzac

#60. 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

#61. Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

Honore De Balzac

#62. 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

#63. Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.

Honore De Balzac

#64. Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.

Honore De Balzac

#65. He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"
the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.

Honore De Balzac

#66. The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.

Honore De Balzac

#67. There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.

Honore De Balzac

#68. Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.

Honore De Balzac

#69. He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

Honore De Balzac

#70. Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.

Honore De Balzac

#71. When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.

Honore De Balzac

#72. Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.

Honore De Balzac

#73. The rout, that dreary review of fashionable fineries, that parade of well-dressed self-infatuations, is one of those English inventions currently mechanifying the other nations. England seems determined to see the entire world bored just as she is, and just as bored as she.

Honore De Balzac

#74. Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.

Honore De Balzac

#75. If only I could bear all your sorrows for you! . . . Ah! you were so happy when you were little and still with me -

Honore De Balzac

#76. Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.

Honore De Balzac

#77. There are words which cut like steel.

Honore De Balzac

#78. To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two?

Honore De Balzac

#79. No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.

Honore De Balzac

#80. Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.

Honore De Balzac

#81. In France we can cauterize wounds but we do not yet know any remedy for the injuries inflicted by a bon mot.

Honore De Balzac

#82. Nay, do not cry, papa," she said, kissing him.

Honore De Balzac

#83. In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Honore De Balzac

#84. Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

Honore De Balzac

#85. It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.

Honore De Balzac

#86. Chooses with the men who seem to her agreeable, without being entered on the tablets of gossip. Certain coquettish women are capable of following a plan of this kind for seven years in order to gratify their fancies

Honore De Balzac

#87. During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.

Honore De Balzac

#88. Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.

Honore De Balzac

#89. White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.

Honore De Balzac

#90. The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.

Honore De Balzac

#91. Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity.

Honore De Balzac

#92. Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.

Honore De Balzac

#93. A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other.

Honore De Balzac