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Honore de Balzac

63 quotes

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist and playwright whose ambitious series of interlinked novels and stories, collectively titled *La Comédie humaine*, paints a sweeping portrait of French society in the decades after the fall of Napoleon. Balzac's keen observation of human nature and social dynamics influenced generations of writers.

“Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.”

— Honore de Balzac

Great

All Quotes by Honore de Balzac

“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

— Honore de Balzac

Great

“Love is the poetry of the senses.”

— Honore de Balzac

Love

“Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.”

— Honore de Balzac

Equality

“Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect without esteem they cannot exist esteem is the first demand that they make of love.”

— Honore de Balzac

Respect

“Finance, like time, devours its own children.”

— Honore de Balzac

Finance

“Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.”

— Honore de Balzac

Love

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

— Honore de Balzac

Power

“It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion it is a joy of every moment.”

— Honore de Balzac

Mom

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

— Honore de Balzac

Alone

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

— Honore de Balzac

Wedding

“The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.”

— Honore de Balzac

Love

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

— Honore de Balzac

Marriage

“A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”

— Honore de Balzac

Love

“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

Men

“A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.”

— Honore de Balzac

Good

“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

Business

“Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!”

— Honore de Balzac

Peace

“There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.”

— Honore de Balzac

Great

“The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.”

— Honore de Balzac

Women

“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”

— Honore de Balzac

Art