Honore de Balzac Quotes

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.

An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.

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

For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.

Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!

Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.

Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.

Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.

Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.

All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.

With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

But woman brings disorder into society through passion.

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

Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.

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

Love which economizes is never true love.

Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.

Conventions are often more cruel than the law.

Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration.

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.

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

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.

Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage.

Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves.

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.

Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,-she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.

Grief ennobles the commonest people because it has its own essential grandeur. To shine with the luster of grief, a person need only be sincere.

The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.

It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.

The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.

Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?

The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

The Parisan, sauntering the streets idly, is as often a man in despair as a lounger.

A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.

Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.

Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.

Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.

God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker

A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.