“Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.”
-honore de Balzac
“A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.”
-honore de Balzac
“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”
-honore de Balzac
“To our shame a woman is never so much attached to us as when we suffer”
-honore de Balzac
“Wit needs leisure, and certain inequalities of position”
-honore de Balzac
“Love is the poetry of the senses.”
-honore de Balzac
“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”
-honore de Balzac
“A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.”
-honore de Balzac
“First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.”
-honore de Balzac
“There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.”
– honore de Balzac
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.”
-honore de Balzac
“What is art? Nature concentrated.”
-honore de Balzac
“The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.”
-honore de Balzac
“The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.”
-honore de Balzac
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?”
-honore de Balzac
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.”
– honore de Balzac
“The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.”
-honore de Balzac
“Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!”
-honore de Balzac
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.”
-honore de Balzac
“At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.”
-honore de Balzac
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
– honore de Balzac
“Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.”
Author: Balzac Quotes Category: French Novelist Quotes
“For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.”
-honore de Balzac
“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.”
Author: Balzac Quotes Category: French Novelist Quotes
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.”
-honore de Balzac
“The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.”
-honore de Balzac
“The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.”
-honore de Balzac
“The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.”
-honore de Balzac
“There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.”
-honore de Balzac
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.”
-honore de Balzac
“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.”
-honore de Balzac
“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 produce the occasional bon mot”
-honore de Balzac
“The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”
-honore de Balzac
“No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”
– honore de Balzac
“One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.”
– honore de Balzac
“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”
-honore de Balzac
“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”
-honore de Balzac
“All happiness depends on courage and work”
-honore de Balzac
“A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.”
-honore de Balzac
“I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.”
-honore de Balzac
“He went to bed and slept the sleep of the good-for-nothing which, by an anachronism not a single songwriter has yet struck, is proven to be more sound than that of innocence”
-honore de Balzac
“A mother who is really a mother is never free.”
-honore de Balzac
“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”
– honore de Balzac
“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
-honore de Balzac
“Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.”
-honore de Balzac
“We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.”
-honore de Balzac
“A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.”
-honore de Balzac