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

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Honore de Balzac

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

Honore de Balzac

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

Honore de Balzac

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Honore de Balzac

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Honore de Balzac

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?

Honore de Balzac

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

Honore de Balzac

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Honore de Balzac

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

Honore de Balzac

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

Honore de Balzac

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

Honore de Balzac

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

Honore de Balzac

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.

Honore de Balzac

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Honore de Balzac

Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.

Honore de Balzac

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind....

Honore de Balzac

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

Honore de Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work.

Honore de Balzac

Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Honore de Balzac

Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man

Honore de Balzac

Glory is the sunshine of the dead

Honore de Balzac

Author Bio

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