Honore de Balzac Quotes

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

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.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

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

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

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

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

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.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

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

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

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.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

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.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

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

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

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

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.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

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

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

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.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

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.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

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

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

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