Honore de Balzac

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
Honore de Balzac

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

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.
Honore de Balzac

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

Finance, like time, devours its own children.
Honore de Balzac

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
Honore de Balzac

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

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
Honore de Balzac

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

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

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

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
Honore de Balzac

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
Honore de Balzac

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

There is something great and terrible about suicide.
Honore de Balzac

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honore de Balzac

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

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.
Honore de Balzac

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
Honore de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.
Honore de Balzac

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
Honore de Balzac

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
Honore de Balzac

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

Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honore de Balzac

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

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

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Honore de Balzac

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

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
Honore de Balzac

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

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

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

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Honore de Balzac

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.
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

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
Honore de Balzac

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