Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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.

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.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

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

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

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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

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.

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

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