836 Quotes by Honoré 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.

The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers.

The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.

Mud, raised by hurricanes, wells up in the noblest and purest of hearts.

God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven.

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly.

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

The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.