A biography for Honore de Balzachasn’t been written yet.
“We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.”
“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”
“No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”
“A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.”
“An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.”
“Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.”
“The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”
“Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.”
“Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.”
“Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Love is the poetry of the senses.”
“Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.”
“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
“Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.”
“A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.”
“A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.”
“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.”
“A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.”