Honoré de Balzac Quotes

“Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.”

“Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.”

“The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers.”

“Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.”

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

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

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

“For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.”

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

“Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.”

“Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.”

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

“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.”

“Temperament is the thermometer of character.”

“Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.”

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

“The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.”

“If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.”

“The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.”

“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.”

“If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.”

“Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.”

“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.”

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

“Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.”