Honore de Balzac Literature Quotations

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

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

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

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

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

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

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

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.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

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

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

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

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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

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

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.

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

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

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

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

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

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

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

What is art? Nature concentrated.