Honoré de Balzac Quotes
Most popular Honoré de Balzac Quotes
Thinking is seeing.
Love has its instinct.
Love is the poetry of the senses.
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
What is Art ... but Nature concentrated?
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Bureaucracy, a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
![I do not regard a [stock] broker as a member of the human race. - Honoré de Balzac quote.](/img/q/32/22332A-i-do-not-regard-a-stock-broker-as-member-human-honore-de-balzac.png)
I do not regard a [stock] broker as a member of the human race.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.
Virtue is, perhaps, no more than a kind of politeness of the soul.
A man should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
Men are like that—they can resist sound argument and yield to a glance.
An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
In diving to the bottom of pleasures we bring up more gravel than pearls.
In music, instruments perform the functions of the colors employed in painting.
Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
A man cannot marry before he has studied anatomy and has dissected at least one woman.
Between you and me, I am not deep, but I am very wide, and it takes time to walk round me.
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself will always be the text of the life of a woman.
First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
The more he plumbed the depths of sensual pleasure, the more he emerged with grit rather than pearls.
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Music appeals to the heart, whereas writing is addressed to the intellect; it communicates ideas directly, like perfume.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the simple reason that it is more difficult to have a ready wit the whole day long than to say a good thing occasionally.
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.
I tell you, my friend, all happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy, and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all. That is why I still hope, and hope much.
Woman is a delicious instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its quivering strings, study the pose of it, its timid keyboard, the changing and capricious fingering. How many orangs—men, I mean, marry without knowing what a woman is!
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work...as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner...he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
Coffee falls into the your stomach, and straightaway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army on the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensign to the wind.
Love is like some fresh spring that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed, and flowers to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
