The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Crime
Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Poverty
A heap of ill-chosen erudition is but the luggage of antiquity.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Learning
Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart, like a viper in its hole.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Envy
Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
—Honore de Balzac
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!
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Thought
Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
—Honore de Balzac
A man’s own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Vanity
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.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love
It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Career
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hope
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation, Role models
No site in the forest is without significance, not a glade, not a thicket that does not provide analogies to the labyrinth of human thoughts. Who among those people with a cultivated spirit, or whose heart has been wounded, can walk in a forest without the forest speaking to him? … If one searched for the causes of that sensation, at once solemn, simple, gentle, mysterious, that seizes one, perhaps it would be found in the sublime and ingenious spectacle of all the creatures obeying their destinies, immutably docile.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Wilderness
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Divinity, Faith, God
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 out virtues.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Women
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Flowers
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Marriage
Someday you will find out that there is far more happiness in another’s happiness than in your own. It is something I cannot explain, something within that sends a glow of warmth all through you.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Joy
After all, our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Anticipation, Misfortune, Worry
Even beauty cannot palliate eccentricity.
—Honore de Balzac
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Mothers, Mothers Day, Forgiveness, Motherhood
The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love
If we all said to people’s faces what we say behind one another’s backs, society would be impossible.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Gossip
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Friends and Friendship
Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Justice
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments or from their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as a skeleton of an ichthyosaur suggests an entire creation. Everything is deducible, everything is linked. The cause allows one to guess the effect, just as each effect allows one to reconstruct a cause. The scientist can resuscitate in this manner even the warts of ancient times. From this comes without doubt the prodigious interest that an architectural description can inspire when the writer’s fantasy is faithful to its basic elements. Cannot each person reattach it to its past by rigorous deductions? And as for man, does not the past singularly resemble the future? Tell him what was and is this not almost always the same thing as telling him what will be?
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Science
Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Innocence
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
- Alfred de Musset French Poet, Playwright
- Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand French Writer, Statesman
- Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) French Writer
- Gustave Flaubert French Novelist
- Guy de Maupassant French Short-story Writer
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Jules Verne French Novelist
- Colette French Novelist, Performer
- Edith Wharton American Novelist, Short-story Writer
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