Quotes By Honore De Balzac

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

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

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

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.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.