Honore de Balzac Quotes

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Honore de Balzac

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 20, 1799

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Honore de Balzac

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Honore de Balzac

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Honore de Balzac

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac