Top 100 Balzac's Quotes

#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

Balzac's Quotes #3346
#2. When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #3443
#3. 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.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #7513
#4. A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #12846
#5. Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #14413
#6. 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

Balzac's Quotes #15811
#7. Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #26843
#8. All human beings go through a previous life ... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #29099
#9. We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #36647
#10. Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #39569
#11. Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #40889
#12. Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #43261
#13. A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #48446
#14. The more a man judges, the less he loves

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #49730
#15. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #50632
#16. Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #54808
#17. 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

Balzac's Quotes #56364
#18. Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #60433
#19. To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #63017
#20. Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #69282
#21. Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #70236
#22. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #70522
#23. In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #73694
#24. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #75168
#25. Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #82210
#26. He will show you how, during the springtime of life, illusions, innocent hopes, silver threads of gossamer, descend from heaven and return there without ever touching the earth.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #82681
#27. Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #90747
#28. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

Gustave Flaubert

Balzac's Quotes #94725
#29. A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #102713
#30. Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #102862
#31. Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #106378
#32. If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #107424
#33. Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #107634
#34. When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #117732
#35. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #118664
#36. Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #120033
#37. Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #120298
#38. The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #123277
#39. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.

Dai Sijie

Balzac's Quotes #131787
#40. who had not felt his daughter's heart beat against his breast for ten years, "do you want me to die of joy?

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #267532
#41. True love is eternal, infinite and always like itself. It's always equal and pure. Without violent demonstrations: It is seen with white hairs and is always young at heart.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #267630
#42. I'd need rest to refresh my brain, and to get rest it's necessary to travel, and to travel one must have money, and in order to get money you have to work ... I am in a vicious circle ... from which it is impossible to escape.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #269489
#43. Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #328449
#44. 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

Balzac's Quotes #338052
#45. The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #339618
#46. 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

Balzac's Quotes #363932
#47. The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #376051
#48. The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #408682
#49. Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #428867
#50. Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #455636
#51. The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #458790
#52. The words came from him like a sob, a hoarse sound like the death rattle of a dying man; it seemed indeed like the agony of death when the father's love was powerless.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #498016
#53. To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #521132
#54. 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.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #564434
#55. Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #573411
#56. No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #574939
#57. The widow employed her woman's malice to devise a system of covert persecution.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #579676
#58. She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.

Dai Sijie

Balzac's Quotes #598821
#59. 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

Balzac's Quotes #609224
#60. It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #657234
#61. A man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #676731
#62. He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #723548
#63. There's nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep, said de Marsay.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #732371
#64. The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life.

Jean Lucey Pratt

Balzac's Quotes #776180
#65. With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #789912
#66. 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.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #800270
#67. An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #812584
#68. 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.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #838850
#69. ...a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that's what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again.... I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #890797
#70. Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #919139
#71. There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

Joanna Walsh

Balzac's Quotes #991033
#72. A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #999992
#73. Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1053962
#74. Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail.

William Ernest Henley

Balzac's Quotes #1069325
#75. 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

Balzac's Quotes #1108270
#76. 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

Balzac's Quotes #1110528
#77. A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1136005
#78. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1137284
#79. Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1192774
#80. In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1210300
#81. A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1263443
#82. One exits with one's husband
one lives with one's lover.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1265344
#83. If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1265997
#84. If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1296889
#85. A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1300762
#86. Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1489733
#87. A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1493295
#88. Pity is woman's sweetest charm.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1548175
#89. True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1550436
#90. It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1572072
#91. Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1590091
#92. Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1714308
#93. It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.

Willa Cather

Balzac's Quotes #1719564
#94. 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

Balzac's Quotes #1748109
#95. Yet, if you have a heart, lock it carefully away like a treasure; do not let any one suspect it, or you will be lost; you would cease to be the executioner, you would take the victim's place.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1802796
#96. Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1807069
#97. Parent may hinder their children's marriage; but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1813927
#98. I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Balzac's Quotes #1819712
#99. A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment's hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1838706
#100. Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,
she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.

Honore De Balzac

Balzac's Quotes #1866986

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