Words matter. These are the best Honore de Balzac Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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.
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
What is art? Nature concentrated.
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
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.
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
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.
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
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.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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.
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
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.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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.
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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.
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.
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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.
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.
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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.
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
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.
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
What is art? Nature concentrated.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
