Balzac's Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Balzac's
Balzac's Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Balzac's quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
— Honore De Balzac
By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.
— Honore De Balzac
A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
— Honore De Balzac
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.
— Honore De Balzac
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.
— Honore De Balzac
The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
— Honore De Balzac
Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.
— Honore De Balzac
A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.
— Honore De Balzac
an honest man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder.
— Honore De Balzac
You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you would pull a tooth.
— Honore De Balzac
If I'd had a man of my own, I'd have followed him ... down to hell.
— Honore De Balzac
One exits with one's husband
one lives with one's lover. — Honore De Balzac
one lives with one's lover. — Honore De Balzac
How can we explain the perpetuity of envy
a vice which yields no return? — Honore De Balzac
a vice which yields no return? — Honore De Balzac
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
— Honore De Balzac
Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
— Honore De Balzac
No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.
— Honore De Balzac
There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
— Honore De Balzac
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.
— Honore De Balzac
All happiness depends on courage and work.
— Honore De Balzac
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
— Honore De Balzac
No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
— Honore De Balzac
Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
— Honore De Balzac
I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's improvement in himself.
— Honore De Balzac
I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.
— Friedrich Engels
The more one judges, the less one loves.
— Honore De Balzac
A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.
— Honore De Balzac
Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.
— Honore De Balzac
He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.
— Honore De Balzac
Christianity and monarchy are twin principles.
— Honore De Balzac
Reading brings us unknown friends
— Honore De Balzac
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
— Honore De Balzac
A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
— Honore De Balzac
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.
— Honore De Balzac
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
— Honore De Balzac
Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
— Honore De Balzac
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
— Honore De Balzac
who had not felt his daughter's heart beat against his breast for ten years, "do you want me to die of joy?
— Honore De Balzac
There's nothing so fearsome as the revolt of a sheep, said de Marsay.
— Honore De Balzac
Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
— Honore De Balzac
A man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.
— Honore De Balzac
It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
— Honore De Balzac
If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
— Honore De Balzac
Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.
— Honore De Balzac
Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.
— Honore De Balzac
It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
— Honore De Balzac
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
— Honore De Balzac
A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
— Honore De Balzac
She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.
— Dai Sijie
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.
— Honore De Balzac
An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
— Honore De Balzac
Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.
— Honore De Balzac
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.
— Honore De Balzac
Pity is woman's sweetest charm.
— Honore De Balzac
Parent may hinder their children's marriage; but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood.
— Honore De Balzac
Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
— Honore De Balzac
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
— Honore De Balzac
Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
— Honore De Balzac
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
— Honore De Balzac
Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit.
— Honore De Balzac
A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
— Honore De Balzac
In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.
— Honore De Balzac
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
— Honore De Balzac
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
— Honore De Balzac
Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.
— Honore De Balzac
Nothing about me surprises me.
— Honore De Balzac
So an honest man is the common enemy.
— Honore De Balzac
Money brings everything to you; even your daughters.
— Honore De Balzac
Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.
— Honore De Balzac
Thought is the only treasure that God sets outside all power and keeps to serve as a secret link among the unhappy.
— Honore De Balzac
Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.
— Honore De Balzac
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
— Honore De Balzac
Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
— Honore De Balzac
Pure herring oil is the port wine of English cats
— Honore De Balzac
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
— Honore De Balzac
Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.
— Honore De Balzac
The union of a want and a sentiment.
— Honore De Balzac
Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
— Honore De Balzac
No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
— Honore De Balzac
For she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through - the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form,
— Honore De Balzac
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
— Honore De Balzac
Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
— Honore De Balzac
Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.
— Honore De Balzac
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
— Honore De Balzac
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
— Honore De Balzac
Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown
— Honore De Balzac
Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.
— Honore De Balzac
Behind every fortune there is a crime.
— Honore De Balzac
A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.
— Honore De Balzac
Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.
— Honore De Balzac
The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
— Honore De Balzac
He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.
— Honore De Balzac
She was white like the sands, tawny like the sands, solitary and burning like the sands.
— Honore De Balzac
Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.
— Honore De Balzac