Honoré de Balzac Quotes

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The passion, observe, which is able to reflect, gives even to ninnies, fools, and imbeciles a species of intelligence, especially in youth.

Honoré de Balzac
Man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy.

Honoré de Balzac
There are certain wives whose confinement makes sarcastic celibates smile.

Honoré de Balzac
A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life

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
It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence.

Honoré de Balzac
Catastrophes dispose all strong and intelligent men to philosophize.

Honoré de Balzac
To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

Honoré de Balzac
A lover has all the virtues and all the defects that a husband has not.

Honoré de Balzac
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

Honoré de Balzac
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Honoré de Balzac
A lover is a herald who proclaims the merit, the wit, or the beauty of a woman: what does a husband proclaim?

Honoré de Balzac
The mistakes of woman result almost always from her faith in the good, and her confidence in the truth.

Honoré de Balzac
In the elevated order of ideas, the life of man is glory; the life of woman is love.

Honoré de Balzac
Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

Honoré de Balzac
A woman full of faith in the one she loves is but a novelist's fancy.

Honoré de Balzac
Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world. Thus man takes note of more than he is able to explain, while the Angelic Spirit sees and comprehends. Science depresses man; Love exalts the Angel. Science is still seeking, Love has found. Man judges Nature according to his own relations to her; the Angelic Spirit judges it in its relation to Heaven. In short, all things have a voice for the Spirit.

Honoré de Balzac
Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon decency.

Honoré de Balzac
Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance; but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.

Honoré de Balzac
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

Honoré de Balzac
Our heart is a treasury; if you spend all its wealth at once you are ruined. We find it as difficult to forgive a person for displaying his feeling in all its nakedness as we do to forgive a man for being penniless.

Honoré de Balzac
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

Honoré de Balzac
The tiniest flower is a thought, — a life which corresponds to certain lineaments of the Great Whole, of which they have a constant intuition.

Honoré de Balzac
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.

Honoré de Balzac
Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

Honoré de Balzac
The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.

Honoré de Balzac
Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.

Honoré de Balzac
No man has yet discovered the means of giving successfully friendly advice to women — not even to his own.

Honoré de Balzac
"Temptations can be got rid of." "How?" "By yielding to them."

Honoré de Balzac
Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.

Honoré de Balzac