A biography for Honore de Balzachasn’t been written yet.
“It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.”
“Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.”
“Modesty is the conscience of the body.”
“The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.”
“What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?”
“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”
“I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.”
“One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.”
“When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.”
“A mother who is really a mother is never free.”
“Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.”
“A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.”
“The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.”
“Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.”
“A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.”
“Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.”
“Finance, like time, devours its own children.”