Quotes by Honore Balzac

• 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.
• Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
• Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
• Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
• Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
• The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
• The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
• Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
• The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
• The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
• 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.
• The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
• Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
• Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
• The more one judges, the less one loves.
• Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
• Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
• One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
• Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
• Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
• Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
• Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
• To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
• For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
• When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
• When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
• What is art? Nature concentrated.
• What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
• We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
• Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
• Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
• The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
• Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
• The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
• 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.
• Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
• There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
• The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
• The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
• The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
• Modesty is the conscience of the body.
• 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.
• 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.
• All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
• Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
• Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
• Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
• Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
• Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
• Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
• But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
• 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.
• Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
• Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
• An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
• Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
• A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
• 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.
• A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
• A mother who is really a mother is never free.
• A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
• A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
• A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
• A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
• At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
• Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
• Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
• 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.
• Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
• Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
• Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
• Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
• Love is the poetry of the senses.
• Love is a game in which one always cheats.
• 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.
• Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
• 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.
• 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.
• Finance, like time, devours its own children.
• Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
• 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.
• First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
• Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
• Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
• 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.
• If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
• In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
• 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.
• It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
• It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
• Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
• 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.