Honore De Balzac Quotes

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!

Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.

Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.

We love because we love.

Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.

Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.

There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.

If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.

Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.

When women love, they forgive everything...

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

He who best knows the world will love it least.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

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

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

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 enjoyments have been intellectual joys.

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

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.

Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.

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

Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.

No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.

Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.

Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.

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

Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles.

Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.

A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.

Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.

Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.

A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.

Love is a game in which one always cheats.

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.