Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Helping Others Quotes

2. “When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Doubt Quotes

3. “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

— Honoré de Balzac

4. “When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Coffee Quotes

5. “Love is the poetry of the senses.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Love Quotes, Valentine's Day Quotes, Cute Love Quotes, Short Love Quotes for Her, Love Quotes for Wife

6. “All happiness depends on courage and work.”

— Honoré de Balzac

7. “The more one judges, the less one loves.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Love Quotes

8. “Finance, like time, devours its own children.”

— Honoré de Balzac

9. “Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.”

— Honoré de Balzac

10. “Reading brings us unknown friends.”

— Honoré de Balzac

11. “There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Real Quotes

12. “To speak of love is to make love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

13. “Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”

— Honoré de Balzac

14. “Resignation is a daily suicide.”

— Honoré de Balzac

15. “There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.”

— Honoré de Balzac

16. “Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”

— Honoré de Balzac

17. “One hour of love has a whole life in it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

18. “There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.”

— Honoré de Balzac

19. “God reveals himself unfailingly to the thoughtful seeker.”

— Honoré de Balzac

20. “Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.”

— Honoré de Balzac

21. “Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

— Honoré de Balzac

22. “No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.”

— Honoré de Balzac

23. “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”

— Honoré de Balzac

24. “A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.”

— Honoré de Balzac

25. “Passion is born deaf and dumb.”

— Honoré de Balzac

26. “A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Good Morning Quotes

27. “The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the countenance.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Habit Quotes

28. “Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.”

— Honoré de Balzac

29. “Talent is a flame, but genius is a fire.”

— Honoré de Balzac

30. “Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.”

— Honoré de Balzac

31. “Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

32. “Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.”

— Honoré de Balzac

33. “An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.”

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Being Single Quotes

34. “The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.”

— Honoré de Balzac

35. “Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

36. “The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.”

— Honoré de Balzac

37. “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”

— Honoré de Balzac

38. “A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.”

— Honoré de Balzac

39. “The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers.”

— Honoré de Balzac

40. “L’amour n’est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.”

— Honoré de Balzac

41. “Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.”

— Honoré de Balzac

42. “I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.”

— Honoré de Balzac

43. “Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.”

— Honoré de Balzac

44. “Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

45. “Love is a game in which one always cheats.”

— Honoré de Balzac

46. “Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.”

— Honoré de Balzac

47. “Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.”

— Honoré de Balzac

48. “Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves.”

— Honoré de Balzac

49. “The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.”

— Honoré de Balzac

50. “The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?”

— Honoré de Balzac