"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."
— Honoré de Balzac

"The more one judges, the less one loves."
— Honoré de Balzac

"All happiness depends on courage and work."
— Honoré de Balzac

"I am a galley slave to pen and ink."
— Honoré de Balzac

"I am not deep, but I am very wide."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
"
— Honoré de Balzac

"It is absurd to pretend that one cannot love the same woman always, as to pretend that a good artist needs several violins to execute a piece of music."
— Honoré de Balzac

"An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Reading brings us unknown friends
"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught."
— Honoré de Balzac

"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"
— Honoré de Balzac

"The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men.
‘What a cold-blooded jest!’ said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.’
From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Passion is born deaf and dumb."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."
— Honoré de Balzac

"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance"
— Honoré de Balzac

"The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin."
— Honoré de Balzac

"It's 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."
— Honoré de Balzac

"There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
"
— Honoré de Balzac

"Life is simply what out feelings do to us."
— Honoré de Balzac

"With monuments as with men, position means everything."
— Honoré de Balzac

"'Yes,' Montriveau went on in an unsteady voice, 'this Catholic faith to which you wish to convert me is a lie that men make for themselves; hope is a lie at the expense of the future; pride, a lie between us and our fellows; and pity, and prudence, and terror are cunning lies. And now my happiness is to be one more lying delusion; I am expected to delude myself, to be willing to give gold coin for silver to the end. If you can so easily dispense with my visits; if you confess me neither as your friend nor your love, you do not care for me! And I, poor fool that I am, tell myself this, and know it, and love you!'"
— Honoré de Balzac (The Duchesse de Langeais, Book Two of 'The Thirteen')

"El amor que nace de repente es el más largo de curar. "
— Honoré de Balzac

"'Young man,' Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare open-mouthed at a picture, 'Don't look at the canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.'"
— Honoré de Balzac (Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu)

"To walk is to vegetate,
to stroll is to live."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true."
— Honoré de Balzac (Le Père Goriot)

"While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being,
and the expansion of a single being, even to God"
— Honoré de Balzac

"If the end of poesy be to bring ideas to the precise point where all the world can see them and can feel them, the poet must incessantly run the gamut of all human intellects, so that he may meet and satisfy them all; he must cover with glowing colors both sentiment and logic, – two powers antagonistic to each other; he must inclose a world of thoughts in a line, sum up philosophies in a picture; his poems are seeds which must fructify in hearts , finding their soil in personal experience. Must he not have felt all, to give all? and to feel all, is not that to suffer everything?"
— Honoré de Balzac (Lost Illusions)

"A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. "
— Honoré de Balzac

"'Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being,
and the expansion of a single being, even to God'
"
— Honoré de Balzac