Honoré de Balzac Quotes

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

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

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

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 greatest tyranny is to love where we are not loved again.

Honoré de Balzac
The secret of great fortunes with no apparent source is a forgotten crime.
Often misquoted as: Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

Honoré de Balzac
Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?

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

Honoré de Balzac
To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.

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
A sick man, surrounded by those who love him, nursed by those who wish earnestly that he should live, will recover (all other things being equal), when another patient tended by hirelings will die. Doctors decline to see unconscious magnestism in this phenomenon; for them it is the result of intelligent nursing, of exact obedience to their orders; but many a mother knows the virtue of such ardent projections of strong, unceasing prayer.

Honoré de Balzac
One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

Honoré de Balzac
For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?

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

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
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