836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?

Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice.

Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.

Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.

In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can.

Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,-she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.

A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.