Source: Cousin Pons
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Famous Honore de Balzac Quotes
“There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.”
“Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.”
“The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.”
“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”
“The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.”
“Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.”
“There is something great and terrible about suicide.”
Source: The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin
“Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.”
Source: Analytical Studies: Physiology of Marriage and Petty Troubles of Married Life
Source: Poor Relations: Cousin Betty and Cousin Pons
“An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.”
“Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.”
Source: A Woman at Thirty
“The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.”
“When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.”
Source: The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin
“At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.”
“Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.”
“Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.”
Source: A Woman of Thirty: Works of Balzac
“Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.”
Source: The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin
“Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite.”
“Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.”
Source: Letters of Two Brides
“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.”
“Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.”
Source: The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin
“The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.”
“To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.”