Quotes from Honore de Balzac

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

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.

She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

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

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.

Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.

Life is simply what out feelings do to us.

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

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.

There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.

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

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.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

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

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.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.