Quotes By 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.

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

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

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

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.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

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

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.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

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

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

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.

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

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.

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