Quotes By Honore De Balzac

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

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 fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

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

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

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

The more one judges, the less one loves.

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

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

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

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.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

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

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.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

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.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

It is 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.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

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

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

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.

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.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.