836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.

We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.

A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!

The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.