Quotes from Honore de Balzac

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

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

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.

For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.

Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.

With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.

Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.

Yes, I can understand that a man might go to a gambling table when he sees that all that lies between him and death is his last crown.

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.

Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.

The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.

I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense.

Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.

In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.

Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.

A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!

The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.