836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Reading brings us unknown friends.

You’re a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You’d make a good catch for the devil.

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist’s imagination.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God’s; the outer side belongs to men.

A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father’s craft.

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.

Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.