Honore de Balzac Quotes

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Honore de Balzac

Profession : Novelist

Birth : May 20, 1799

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac