Honoré de Balzac Quotes

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

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

Honoré de Balzac
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even for our virtues.

Honoré de Balzac
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

Honoré de Balzac
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Honoré de Balzac
When all that is fond in our nature is most thoroughly awakened, when we feel most deeply and tenderly — even then, love is so conscious of its instability that we are irresistibly prompted to ask: Do you love me? Will you love me always?

Honoré de Balzac
Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

Honoré de Balzac
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

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

Honoré de Balzac
Marriage often unites for life two people who scarcely know each other.

Honoré de Balzac
Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting.

Honoré de Balzac
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

Honoré de Balzac
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

Honoré de Balzac
The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.

Honoré de Balzac
We are finite beings: there can be no infinite happiness for us. The soul that dreams it and pursues it will embrace but a shadow.

Honoré de Balzac
The provinces are provinces; they are only ridiculous when they mimic Paris.

Honoré de Balzac
How can we explain the perpetuity of envy — a vice which yields no return?

Honoré de Balzac
A woman who is guided by the head, and not by the heart, is a social pestilence: she has all the defects of the passionate and affectionate woman, with none of her compensations; she is without pity, without love, without virtue, without sex.

Honoré de Balzac
In this advanced century, a girl of sixteen knows as much as her mother, and enjoys her knowledge much more.

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
The greatest tyranny is to love where we are not loved again.

Honoré de Balzac
White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.

Honoré de Balzac
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

Honoré de Balzac
To provoke laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.

Honoré de Balzac
Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.

Honoré de Balzac
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye!

Honoré de Balzac
We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

Honoré de Balzac
It is no sin to be tempted; the wickedness lies in being overcome.

Honoré de Balzac
What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible.

Honoré de Balzac
The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

Honoré de Balzac