Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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.

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.

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

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

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

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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

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.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

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

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.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.

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