Quotes by "Honore de Balzac"

Reading brings us unknown friends

Necessity is often the spur to genius.

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

All happiness depends on courage and work.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.

Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

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

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

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.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.

for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea

Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man

The more he saw, the more he doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, beneath the surface, courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men. ‘What a cold-blooded jest!’ said he to himself. ‘It was not devised by a God.’ From that time forth he renounced a better world, and never uncovered himself when a Name was pronounced, and for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art

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