Top 100 Honore De Balzac Quotes
#1. The only street I like is Rue Honore de Balzac, because 'Balzac' sound so gay, and I love my gays. I might like Parisians more if they named their streets only for gay icons, like Rue Liza Minnelli or Rue Bette Midler or, my favorite, Rue McClanahan.
Joan Rivers
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
Honore De Balzac
#6. Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.
Honore De Balzac
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
Honore De Balzac
#12. Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.
Honore De Balzac
#13. Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Honore De Balzac
#14. A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
Honore De Balzac
#16. 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
#17. Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
Honore De Balzac
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
Honore De Balzac
#21. 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
#23. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
Honore De Balzac
#24. In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.
Honore De Balzac
#25. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
Honore De Balzac
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
Honore De Balzac
#29. A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
Honore De Balzac
#30. Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
Honore De Balzac
#31. Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.
Honore De Balzac
#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
#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
#34. When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
Honore De Balzac
#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
#36. Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.
Honore De Balzac
#37. Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
Honore De Balzac
#38. The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.
Honore De Balzac
#39. Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations.
Honore De Balzac
#40. The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
Honore De Balzac
#42. Misfortune is a stepping stone for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, treasure for the skillful man, an abyss for the feeble.
Honore De Balzac
#44. The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
Honore De Balzac
#45. 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
#46. It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
Honore De Balzac
#47. If ye were of this world the world would love you, but I have chosen you out of the world; be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.
Honore De Balzac
#48. When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.
Honore De Balzac
#49. Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
Honore De Balzac
#50. When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?
Honore De Balzac
#51. The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
Honore De Balzac
#52. The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others
existences which the spirit alone remembers, for matter has no memory for spiritual things.
Honore De Balzac
#54. So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices.
Honore De Balzac
#55. The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
Honore De Balzac
#56. Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
Honore De Balzac
#58. The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Honore De Balzac
#59. Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
Honore De Balzac
#60. No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.
Honore De Balzac
#61. No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.
Honore De Balzac
#62. A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.
Honore De Balzac
#63. Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
Honore De Balzac
#64. Instead of inspiring the gallant attentions which other women seek, she made men dream,
Honore De Balzac
#65. By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.
Honore De Balzac
#66. Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
Honore De Balzac
#68. Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
Honore De Balzac
#70. Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.
Honore De Balzac
#71. The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
Honore De Balzac
#72. It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
Honore De Balzac
#73. 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.
Honore De Balzac
#74. In order not to make him a fixed idea, a regret, a struggle, - three things which poison life.
Honore De Balzac
#76. Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
Honore De Balzac
#77. Does not any limit imposed upon one inspire a desire to go beyond it? Does not our keenest suffering arise when our free will is crossed?
Honore De Balzac
#78. Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.
Honore De Balzac
#79. To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.
Honore De Balzac
#81. Our Father in heaven is surely on the side of fathers on earth who love their children.
Honore De Balzac
#82. It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
Honore De Balzac
#83. The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
Honore De Balzac
#84. 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
#85. Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
Honore De Balzac
#87. Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.
Honore De Balzac
#88. A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.
Honore De Balzac
#91. So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.
Honore De Balzac
#92. A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Honore De Balzac
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
Honore De Balzac
#97. 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
#99. Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
Honore De Balzac
#100. Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
Honore De Balzac
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