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Honore de Balzac [1799-1850] French

Rank: 101
Novelist

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.

Love, Marriage, Women, Great, Mom, Power, Art, Equality, Finance, Happiness, Society, Wisdom, Anniversary, Beauty, Chance, Dating, Forgiveness, Friendship, Future, God, Intelligence, Legal, Men, Morning, Mother's Day, Nature, Parenting, Poetry, Politics, Positive, Relationship, Religion, Respect, Smile, Wedding

Quote	Tags	Rank
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.	Forgiveness, Mom	101
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.	Love	102
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.	Anniversary, Marriage	103
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.	Love	104
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.	God, Nature	105
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.	Marriage	106
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.	Marriage	107
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.	Dating	108
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.	Equality, Power	109
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.		110
The more one judges, the less one loves.	Love	111
Love is the poetry of the senses.	Love, Poetry	112
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.	Great, Power	113
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.	Wisdom	114
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.	Legal	115
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.	Marriage, Morning	116
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.	Wedding	117
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.	Great	118
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.	Love	119
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.		120
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.	Art, Mom	121
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.		122
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.		123
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.	Men, Women	124
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.	Friendship	125
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.	Art	126
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.		201
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.	Great	202
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.		203
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.	Future, Happiness, Mother's Day	204
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.	Smile, Women	205
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.	Power	206
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.	Relationship	207
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.	Society	208
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.	Mom	209
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.		210
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.		211
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.		212
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.	Equality	213
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.	Respect, Women	214
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.		215
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.		216
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.		217
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.	Society	218
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.		219
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.		220
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.		221
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.		222
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.		223
Love is a game in which one always cheats.		224
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.	Politics	225
A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.		226
Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.		301
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.	Love	302
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!		303
Modesty is the conscience of the body.		304
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.	Religion	305
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.		306
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?		307
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.	Wisdom	308
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.	Positive	309
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.		310
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.		311
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.	Finance	312
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.	Happiness	313
Finance, like time, devours its own children.	Finance	314
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.		315
It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.		316
There is something great and terrible about suicide.		317
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!		318
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.		319
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.		320
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.	Chance	321
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.		322
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.		323
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.	Beauty	324
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.		325
What is art? Nature concentrated.		326
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.		401
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.		402
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.		403
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.		404
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.		405
A mother who is really a mother is never free.	Parenting	406
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.		407
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.		408
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.		409
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.		410
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?		411
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.		412
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.		413
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.		414
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.		415
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.		416
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.		417
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.		418
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.		419
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.	Women	420
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.		421
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.	Intelligence	422
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.		423
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.		424
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.		425
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.		426

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