836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.

On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.

Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.'

There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.

Law is a silvery web that lets the big flies pass and catches all the small ones.

Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.

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.

Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.

Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.