836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

We flew back home like swallows. ‘Is it happiness that makes us so light?’ Agathe asked.

Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world – the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?

L’amour n’est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.

An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband’s infidelities.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance.

I’m a great poet. I don’t put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.

In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon’s defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.

A man’s own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.