Famous Quotes

Quotes by Honore De Balzac

• A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
• A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
• A mother who is really a mother is never free.
• A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
• A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
• A young bride is like a plucked flower but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
• All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
• At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.
• Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
• But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
• Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
• Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
• Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.
• Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
• Finance, like time, devours its own children.
• First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
• For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
• Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
• I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
• Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
• If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
• It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
• It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
• It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion it is a joy of every moment.
• 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.
• Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
• Love is the poetry of the senses.
• Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
• 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.
• Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
• Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
• Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
• No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
• Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
• Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
• One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.