Honoré de Balzac Quotes

247 Sourced Quotes

In love, a woman is like a lyre that surrenders its secrets only to the hand that knows how to touch its strings.

Honoré de Balzac
Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

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

Honoré de Balzac
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