Novelist · French · 1799 – 1850 · 104 quotes
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.
Honore de Balzac
Novelist · French · 1799 – 1850
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.
Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
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.
A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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.
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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 man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
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.
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
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.
Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
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.
Love is a game in which one always cheats.
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
There is something great and terrible about suicide.
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.
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.
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
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.
The more one judges, the less one loves.
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.
What is art? Nature concentrated.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
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.
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
