836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.

Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.

Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.

Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.

A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.

How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?