Skip to content

God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven.

— Honoré de Balzac Socrate Chrétien; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Dieu est le poète, les hommes ne sont que les acteurs. Ces grandes pièces qui se jouent sur la terre ont été composées dans le ciel.

Original text (French)

Another quote →

Topics

Society

More quotes by Honoré de Balzac

Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.

Séraphîta (1835)

The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

Séraphîta (1835)

Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

Séraphîta (1835)

Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colours employed in painting.

Gambara (1837)

All human power is a compound of time and patience.

All Honoré de Balzac quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Honoré de Balzac (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.