Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

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.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

What is art? Nature concentrated.