Quotes By Honore De Balzac

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

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.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

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.

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

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.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.

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.