Honore de Balzac Quotes and Sayings
- 1
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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A man is a poor creature compared to a woman. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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A mother who is really a mother is never free. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Finance, like time, devours its own children. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Love is a game in which one always cheats. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Love is the poetry of the senses. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
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Modesty is the conscience of the body. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 43
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 44
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 45
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 46
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 47
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 48
Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 49
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 50
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 51
Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 52
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 53
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 54
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 56
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 57
The more one judges, the less one loves. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 58
The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 59
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 60
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 61
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 62
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 63
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 64
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 65
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 66
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. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 67
Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 68
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 69
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 70
What is art? Nature concentrated. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 71
When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 72
When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑
- 73
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 74
Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love. Honore de Balzac | Refcard PDF ↑