836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.

Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.

There is nothing original; all is reflected light.

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.

Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.