Honore de Balzac Mean Quotations

What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.

When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.

Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.