Quotes from Honore de Balzac

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

When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned

Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.

Sensuality is the death of the soul.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

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.

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.

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.

Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it.

Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.

By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.

What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.

Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.

Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.

We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.

Le coeur d'une me' re est un ab|"me au fond duquel se trouve toujours un pardon. A mother'sheart isanabyss atthebottomof whichthere is always forgiveness.

Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

A courage which looks easy and yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons - the least rewarded of all forms of courage

When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.