Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought

A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as Im concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought?

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

We estimate wrongdoing in proportion to the purity of our conscience

There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances. The superior man espouses events and circumstances in order to guide them. If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts and a man can not be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

The word love, used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.

Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

The more a man judges, the less he loves

Paris that eternal monstrous marvel … the city of a hundred-thousand novels … a living creature, the great courtesan whose face and heart and mind-boggling morals they know: “They” are the lovers of Paris.

“A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.”

“Glory is the sunshine of the dead”

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in anothers happiness than in your own.”

“And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.”

“If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.”

“Love is the poetry of the senses!”

“All happiness depends on courage and work.”