Quotes By Honore De Balzac

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

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

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.