Honoré de Balzac Quotes

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Modesty is the conscience of the body.

Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,--she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

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.

No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love--how can there be any separate concerns in that case?

Doing his utmost, deploying all his energy, a young man setting out from zero can wind up after ten years somewhere below where he started.

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.

Poverty has in its favour an exquisite sleep filled with beautiful dreams.

Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?

We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.

The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.

Вера в себя способна творить такие же чудеса, как вера в Господа Бога.

What moralists describe as the mysteries of the human heart are solely the deceiving thoughts, the spontaneous impulses of self-regard. The sudden changes in character, about which so much has been said, are instinctive calculations for the furtherance of our own pleasures. Seeing himself now in his fine clothes, his new gloves and shoes, Eugène de Rastignac forgot his noble resolve. Youth, when it swerves toward wrong, dares not look in the mirror of conscience; maturity has already seen itself there. That is the whole difference between the two phases of life.

Some troubles like a protested note of a solvent debtor bear interest.

There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought

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