Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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.

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.

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.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.