Top 676 Quotes & Sayings by Honore de Balzac
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Honore de Balzac.
Last updated on April 13, 2025.
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
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.
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
The more one judges, the less one loves.
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
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.
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.
There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.
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.
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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.
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
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.
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.
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
What is art? Nature concentrated.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
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.
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
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