Quotes By Honore De Balzac

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

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.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

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.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

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

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

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.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?