French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Everywhere you find the man of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who torments himself; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Discretion is the best form of calculation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The colonel and the lawyer, delighted to lay hands on a fool whose money would be useful to their schemes, and who might himself, in certain cases, be made to bell the cat, while his house would serve as a meeting-ground for the scattered elements of the party, made the most of the Rogrons’ ill-will against the upper classes of the place. The three had already a slight tie in their united subscription to the "Constitutionnel"; it would certainly not be difficult for the colonel to make a Liberal of the ex-mercer, though Rogron knew so little of politics that he was capable of regarding the exploits of Sergeant Mercier as those of a brother shopkeeper.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others--existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita