Honore de Balzac Quotes

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

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 is a game in which one always cheats.

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.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

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.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.'

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

Necessity is often the spur to genius.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

All happiness depends on courage and work.

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.