Honore de Balzac quotes

“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

“For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth. ”

— Honore de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

“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

“Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.”

— Honore de Balzac

“The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.”

— Honore de Balzac

“The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.”

— Honore de Balzac

“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.”

— Honore de Balzac

“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. ”

— Honore de Balzac

“The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.”

— Honore de Balzac

“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

“Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.”

— Honore de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

“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