Honoré de Balzac Quotes

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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?

Honoré de Balzac
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.

Honoré de Balzac
It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.

Honoré de Balzac
Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

Honoré de Balzac
A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.

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

Honoré de Balzac
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

Honoré de Balzac
When two beings are united by love, all social conventionalities are suspended.

Honoré de Balzac
To give birth to a desire, to nourish it, to develop it, to increase it, to irritate it, to satisfy it: this is a whole poem.

Honoré de Balzac
To judge a country one does not know the language of, is like judging a book from the binding.

Honoré de Balzac
Like many widows, she came to the unwise decision of remarrying.

Honoré de Balzac
To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier.

Honoré de Balzac
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.

Honoré de Balzac
I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.

Honoré de Balzac
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.

Honoré de Balzac
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

Honoré de Balzac
A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

Honoré de Balzac
A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.

Honoré de Balzac
The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity.

Honoré de Balzac
A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin, — occupation.

Honoré de Balzac
A woman, when she has passed forty, becomes an illegible scrawl; only an old woman is capable of divining old women.

Honoré de Balzac
The glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors and Surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.

Honoré de Balzac
Modern chemistry is much, and yet little. Much has been accomplished, for chemistry has learned to shrink before no difficulties; little, because what has been accomplished is as nothing compared with what remains to do.

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

Honoré de Balzac
Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

Honoré de Balzac
Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.

Honoré de Balzac
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!

Honoré de Balzac
In Paris, when certain people see you ready to set your foot in the stirrup, some pull your coat-tails, others loosen the buckle of the strap that you may fall and crack your skull; one wrenches off your horse's shoes, another steals your whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

Honoré de Balzac