836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.

Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.

Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.

The man whom fate employs to awaken love in the heart of a young girl is often unaware of his work and therefore leaves it uncompleted.

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Behind every fortune there is a crime.

There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.

From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.