Honore de Balzac

To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
Honore De Balzac

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
Honore De Balzac

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
Honore De Balzac

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
Honore De Balzac

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
Honore De Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
Honoré de Balzac

A woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea.
Honoré de Balzac

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Honoré de Balzac

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
Honoré de Balzac

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.
Honore de Balzac

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
Honore de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
Honore de Balzac

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
Honore de Balzac

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
Honore de Balzac

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

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
Honore de Balzac

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
Honore de Balzac

Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
Honore de Balzac

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
Honore de Balzac

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
Honore de Balzac

But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
Honore de Balzac

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
Honore de Balzac

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
Honore de Balzac

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
Honore de Balzac

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
Honore de Balzac

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
Honore de Balzac

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
Honore de Balzac

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore de Balzac

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Honore de Balzac

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
Honore de Balzac

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
Honore de Balzac

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
Honore de Balzac

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
Honore de Balzac

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Honore de Balzac

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!
Honore de Balzac

The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
Honore de Balzac

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
Honore de Balzac

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
Honore de Balzac

What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
Honore de Balzac

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Honore de Balzac

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.
Honore de Balzac

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Honore de Balzac

A mother who is really a mother is never free.
Honore de Balzac

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
Honore de Balzac

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
Honore de Balzac

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
Honore de Balzac

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
Honore de Balzac

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Honore de Balzac

The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
Honore de Balzac