Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

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

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

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

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.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

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.

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

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.

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.