Quotes from Honore de Balzac

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

This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

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

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

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.

The secret of great fortunes with no apparent source is a forgotten crime.

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

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

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

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

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

I shatter every obstacle.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

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.

"Temptations can be got rid of." "How?" "By yielding to them."