Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!”

— Honoré de Balzac

452. “In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can.”

— Honoré de Balzac

453. “One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

454. “Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.”

— Honoré de Balzac

455. “To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.”

— Honoré de Balzac

456. “When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?”

— Honoré de Balzac

457. “Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.”

— Honoré de Balzac

458. “Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.”

— Honoré de Balzac

459. “Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.”

— Honoré de Balzac

460. “Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.”

— Honoré de Balzac

461. “The greater a man’s talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

462. “When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.”

— Honoré de Balzac

463. “Let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks, the statesmen.”

— Honoré de Balzac

464. “Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.”

— Honoré de Balzac

465. “Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves.”

— Honoré de Balzac

466. “A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.”

— Honoré de Balzac

467. “Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.”

— Honoré de Balzac

468. “One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

469. “A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist’s imagination.”

— Honoré de Balzac

470. “What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.”

— Honoré de Balzac

471. “When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.”

— Honoré de Balzac

472. “We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God’s; the outer side belongs to men.”

— Honoré de Balzac

473. “Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.”

— Honoré de Balzac

474. “Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.”

— Honoré de Balzac

475. “Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.”

— Honoré de Balzac

476. “Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal.”

— Honoré de Balzac

477. “Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.”

— Honoré de Balzac

478. “To have one’s mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.”

— Honoré de Balzac

479. “A husband who submits to his wife’s yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman’s influence ought to be entirely concealed.”

— Honoré de Balzac

480. “A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!”

— Honoré de Balzac

481. “No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

482. “With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul’s infinite.”

— Honoré de Balzac

483. “A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.”

— Honoré de Balzac

484. “Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.”

— Honoré de Balzac

485. “The greatest joy a petty soul can taste is to dupe a great soul and catch it in a snare.”

— Honoré de Balzac

486. “The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.”

— Honoré de Balzac

487. “Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret.”

— Honoré de Balzac

488. “For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life.”

— Honoré de Balzac

489. “There is something great and terrible about suicide.”

— Honoré de Balzac

490. “Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.”

— Honoré de Balzac

491. “True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe’s conceit.”

— Honoré de Balzac

492. “Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.”

— Honoré de Balzac

493. “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.”

— Honoré de Balzac

494. “Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.”

— Honoré de Balzac

495. “Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles.”

— Honoré de Balzac

496. “To have fame follow us is well, but it is not a desirable avant-courier.”

— Honoré de Balzac

497. “The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.”

— Honoré de Balzac

498. “We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.”

— Honoré de Balzac

499. “A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.”

— Honoré de Balzac

500. “If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.”

— Honoré de Balzac