Honoré de Balzac quotes - page 2

Those who spend too fast never grow rich. (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
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
Honoré de Balzac
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
Honoré de Balzac
My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
Honoré de Balzac
Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
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
Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.
Honoré de Balzac
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
Honoré de Balzac
Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
Honoré de Balzac
Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood! (Honoré de Balzac)
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
Honoré de Balzac
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
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
But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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
Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
Honoré de Balzac
Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
Honoré de Balzac
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance. (Honoré de Balzac)
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honoré de Balzac
What is art? Nature concentrated.
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
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Honoré de Balzac