836 Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

The duration of a couple’s passion is in proportion to the woman’s original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.

As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature – in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing – he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.

Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman’s face.

Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l’habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l’Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

The man who enters his wife’s dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.

With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul’s infinite.

Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God’s very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.

If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment – giving to that word its exact significance.