Honore de Balzac
93 quotes
Biography
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie humaine, described as a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus.
"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."
"A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea."
"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."
"If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye."
"When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt."
"The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition."
"Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty."
"Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless."
"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."
"At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman."
"Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty."
"Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin."
"A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists."
"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."
"Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling."
"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact."
"Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart."
"I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race."
"Finance, like time, devours its own children."
"The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness."
"A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories."
"Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God."
"A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning."
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
"There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power."