Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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.

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

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

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

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.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

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.

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.

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

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

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

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

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.