Quotes by Honore de Balzac

About Honore de Balzac:

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Honore de Balzac

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

Honore de Balzac

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

Honore de Balzac

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Honore de Balzac

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

Honore de Balzac

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

It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

Honore de Balzac

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

Honore de Balzac

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Honore de Balzac

Author Bio

  • NameHonore de Balzac
  • DescriptionFrench writer
  • AliasesBalzac
  • BornMay 20, 1799
  • DiedAugust 19, 1850
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Journalist; Literary Critic; Novelist; Printer