Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Passion, Romance
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
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Justice
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
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
A heap of ill-chosen erudition is but the luggage of antiquity.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Learning
We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The canon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor and reign at the universities, but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.
—Honore de Balzac
Anybody who would like to travel as an archaeologist of mores and observe men instead of rocks could find an image of the century of Louis XV in some village in Provence, that of Louis XIV in Poitou, that of even more remote times in the far reaches of Brittany. Most of these cities have fallen from some splendor that historians, more preoccupied with dates than customs, no longer speak of, but whose memory lives on, such as in Brittany, where the national character scarcely accepts the forgetting of what this country is fundamentally about… All of these cities have their primitive character.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Travel
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Money
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hope
A woman has this quality in common with the angels, that those who suffer belong to her.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Woman
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.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure
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
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
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
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Foolishness, Animals, Fools
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Inheritance
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Solitude
Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Failure
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation
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
In diving to the bottom of pleasures we bring up more gravel than pearls.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure
There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.
—Honore de Balzac
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
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
Topics: Fortune
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Modesty, Conscience, Humility
When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Betrayal
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
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
Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man’s appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Eating
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Guy de Maupassant French Short-story Writer
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Edith Wharton American Novelist, Short-story Writer