Top 104 Quotes by Honore de Balzac

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

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

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.

Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

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.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

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

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.