Honore de Balzac famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The more one judges, the less one loves.
-- Honore de Balzac -
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
-- Honore de Balzac -
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
-- Honore de Balzac -
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
-- Honore de Balzac -
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
-- Honore de Balzac -
True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, ...
-- Honore de Balzac -
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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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 secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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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 -
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.'
-- Honore de Balzac -
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Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
-- Honore de Balzac -
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
-- Honore de Balzac -
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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 -
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
-- Honore de Balzac -
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
-- Honore de Balzac -
I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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There is something great and terrible about suicide.
-- Honore de Balzac -
We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance
-- Honore de Balzac -
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All happiness depends on courage and work.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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.
-- Honore de Balzac -
It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
-- Honore de Balzac -
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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A mother who is really a mother is never free.
-- Honore de Balzac -
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
-- Honore de Balzac -
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
-- Honore de Balzac -
For the person who loves God, worship is the daily bread of patience.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man
-- Honore de Balzac -
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.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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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 -
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...
-- Honore de Balzac -
Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
-- Honore de Balzac -
A courage which looks easy & yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
-- Honore de Balzac -
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A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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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 -
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac -
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
-- Honore de Balzac -
No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.
-- Honore de Balzac -
The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
-- Honore de Balzac -
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
-- Honore de Balzac -
At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.
-- Honore de Balzac -
There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
-- Honore de Balzac -
When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.
-- Honore de Balzac -
Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
-- Honore de Balzac -
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