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.
Honore de Balzac

It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.
Honore de Balzac

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
Honore de Balzac

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
Honore De Balzac

Love is a game in which one always cheats.
Honore de Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses.
Honore de Balzac

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
Honore de Balzac

Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.
Honore De Balzac

Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.
Honore de Balzac

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
Honore de Balzac

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
Honore De Balzac

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
Honore de Balzac

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
Honore De Balzac

Modesty is the conscience of the body.
Honore de Balzac

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
Honore de Balzac

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
Honore de Balzac

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
Honore de Balzac

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
Honore de Balzac

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
Honore de Balzac

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.
Honore De Balzac