Honoré de Balzac > Quotes

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie Du Mariage

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Reading brings us unknown friends”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

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

“Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“I am not deep, but I am very wide.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.”
― 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

“It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”
― 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

“I am a galley slave to pen and ink.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Passion is born deaf and dumb.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“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.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Life is simply what out feelings do to us.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”
― 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

“Love is the poetry of the senses!”
― Honoré de Balzac

“First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint a second time.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Love is a game in which one always cheats.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“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

“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 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

“Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being,
and the expansion of a single being, even to God”
― Honoré de Balzac

“I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

“True love rules especially through memory.”
― Honoré de Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes

“The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“El amor que nace de repente es el más largo de curar. ”
― Honoré de Balzac

“While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.”
― Honoré de Balzac