836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

With monuments as with men, position means everything.

When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.

A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.

Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.