Honore de Balzac quotes:

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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 mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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.
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.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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.
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.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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 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.
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
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.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
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.
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?
Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.
Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.
Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.
Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations."
Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.
The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?
Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.
Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found.
True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
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.
It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady.
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
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.
Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.
I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.
During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.
Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
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.
My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one.
Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.
You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.
Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.
No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.
A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...
Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.
For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.
Passion is born deaf and dumb.
A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.
Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.
Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.
He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.
Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
La femme marie e est un esclave qu'il faut savoir mettre sur un tro" n e. A married woman is a slave whom one must put on a throne.
Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gestures or quick movements inspire involuntary disrespect.
It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.
Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from? [Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?]
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless.
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.
In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.
As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

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