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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.

“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

All Quotes by Honore de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

Marriage

“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

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

— Honore de Balzac

Power

“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

Great

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

— Honore de Balzac

Equality

“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”

— 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

“Love is the poetry of the senses.”

— Honore de Balzac

Love

“Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.”

— Honore de Balzac

Death

“But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.”

— Honore de Balzac

Positive

“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”

— Honore de Balzac

Forgiveness

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

— Honore de Balzac

Art

“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”

— Honore de Balzac

Friendship

“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

“Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.”

— Honore de Balzac

Marriage

“We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.”

— Honore de Balzac

Happiness

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

— Honore de Balzac

Great

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

— Honore de Balzac

Art

“There is something great and terrible about suicide.”

— Honore de Balzac

Great

“Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.”

— Honore de Balzac

Business