Honoré de Balzac Quotes

Paris that eternal monstrous marvel … the city of a hundred-thousand novels … a living creature, the great courtesan whose face and heart and mind-boggling morals they know: “They” are the lovers of Paris.
Honoré de Balzac
Our worst misfortunes never happen and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
Believe everything you hear said of the world nothing is too impossibly bad.
Honoré de Balzac
All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness but with energy and above all with illusions I pulled through them all.
Honoré de Balzac
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.
Honoré de Balzac
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Honoré de Balzac
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions envy is only moved to malice.
Honoré de Balzac
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honoré de Balzac
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion history romance and art would be useless.
Honoré de Balzac
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Honoré de Balzac
If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!
Honoré de Balzac
Envy is the most stupid of vices for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
Honoré de Balzac
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honoré de Balzac
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion history romance and art would be useless.
Honoré de Balzac
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Honoré de Balzac
If we could but paint with the hand as we see with the eye!
Honoré de Balzac
Envy is the most stupid of vices for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
Honoré de Balzac
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honoré de Balzac
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
Honoré de Balzac
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
Honoré de Balzac
To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
Honoré de Balzac
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Honoré de Balzac
Hope is a light diet but very stimulating.
Honoré de Balzac
All happiness depends on courage and work.
Honoré de Balzac
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honoré de Balzac
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
Honoré de Balzac
There are moments in life when all that we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us our wounds would wince at consoling words that would reveal the depths of our pain.
Honoré de Balzac
Some troubles like a protested note of a solvent debtor bear interest.
Honoré de Balzac
We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
Honoré de Balzac
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Honoré de Balzac
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
The more a man judges, the less he loves
Honoré de Balzac
Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.
Honoré de Balzac
The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.
Honoré de Balzac
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.
Honoré de Balzac
We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience
Honoré de Balzac
We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.
Honoré de Balzac
A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought?
Honoré de Balzac
There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought
Honoré de Balzac
Here comes Mamma Vauquerr, fair as a starrr; and strung up like a bunch of carrots. Aren't we suffocating ourselves a wee bit?' he asked, placing a hand on the top of her corset. 'A bit of a crush in the vestibule, here, Mamma! If we start crying, there'll be an explosion. Never mind, I'll be there to collect the bits--just like an antiquary.''Now, there's the language of true French gallantry,' murmured Madame Vauquer in an aside to Madame Couture.
Honoré de Balzac
He became...the ideal of that virtue which delights in its own work...doing everything with simplicity and dignity, for he seemed to realize that his objective added nobility to everything he did.
Honoré de Balzac
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
Honoré de Balzac
He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"--the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved.
Honoré de Balzac
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
Honoré de Balzac
So, my dear fellow, if I don't believe in God, I believe still less in man.
Honoré de Balzac
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.
Honoré de Balzac
Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.
Honoré de Balzac
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Honoré de Balzac
Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.
Honoré de Balzac
No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.
Honoré de Balzac
In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
Honoré de Balzac
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
Honoré de Balzac
Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
Honoré de Balzac
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Honoré de Balzac