Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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.

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.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

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

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

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.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.