Life Quotes by Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work.

— Honore de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

— Honore de Balzac

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.

— Honore de Balzac

One hour of love has a whole life in it.

— Honore de Balzac

While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.

— Honore de Balzac

Life is simply what out feelings do to us.

— Honore de Balzac

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

— Honore de Balzac

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.

— Honore de Balzac

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.

— Honore de Balzac

Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not…

— Honore de Balzac

“for a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea”

— Honore De Balzac

When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.

— Honore de Balzac

To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

— Honore de Balzac

In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

— Honore de Balzac

“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can turn it into a fact.”

— Honoré de Balzac

The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces…

— Honore de Balzac

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and…

— Honore de Balzac

“Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the…

— Honoré de Balzac

In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become…

— Honore de Balzac

The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the…

— Honore de Balzac

“So often it happens that this one or that stands condemned by the social laws that govern family relations; and yet there…

— Honoré de Balzac

There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would…

— Honore de Balzac

The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom…

— Honore de Balzac

To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live……

— Honore de Balzac

A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who…

— Honore de Balzac

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.

— Honore de Balzac

Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice.

— Honore de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

“Cruelty and fear shake hands together. An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.”

— Honoré de Balzac

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.

— Honore de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.

— Honore de Balzac

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

— Honore de Balzac

For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.

— Honore de Balzac

“I shall still live on as a memory on your palette; that shall be life for me afterward.”

— Honoré de Balzac

“What do we know of the world, of business, or men, or life? Our fathers should think for us!”

— Honoré de Balzac

Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality,…

— Honore de Balzac

“Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is…

— Honoré de Balzac

In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that…

— Honore de Balzac