Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.”

— Honoré de Balzac

52. “Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.”

— Honoré de Balzac

53. “Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.”

— Honoré de Balzac

54. “There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman’s glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.”

— Honoré de Balzac

55. “Life cannot go on without much forgetting.”

— Honoré de Balzac

56. “Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found.”

— Honoré de Balzac

57. “Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.”

— Honoré de Balzac

58. “All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.”

— Honoré de Balzac

59. “The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.”

— Honoré de Balzac

60. “I am not deep, but I am very wide.”

— Honoré de Balzac

61. “Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future.”

— Honoré de Balzac

62. “Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another’s happiness than in your own.”

— Honoré de Balzac

63. “There is nothing original; all is reflected light.”

— Honoré de Balzac

64. “Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.”

— Honoré de Balzac

65. “Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

66. “Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.”

— Honoré de Balzac

67. “Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

68. “A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.”

— Honoré de Balzac

69. “We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.”

— Honoré de Balzac

70. “Rare is the man who suffers no remorse as he passes from the state of confidant to that of rival.”

— Honoré de Balzac

71. “Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.”

— Honoré de Balzac

72. “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.”

— Honoré de Balzac

73. “Temperament is the thermometer of character.”

— Honoré de Balzac

74. “The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

75. “Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

76. “A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

77. “Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.”

— Honoré de Balzac

78. “How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy!”

— Honoré de Balzac

79. “Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

80. “The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.”

— Honoré de Balzac

81. “Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.”

— Honoré de Balzac

82. “A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

83. “Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

84. “Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!”

— Honoré de Balzac

85. “In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon’s defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.”

— Honoré de Balzac

86. “Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!”

— Honoré de Balzac

87. “A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.”

— Honoré de Balzac

88. “Modesty is the conscience of the body.”

— Honoré de Balzac

89. “No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.”

— Honoré de Balzac

90. “No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.”

— Honoré de Balzac

91. “Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.”

— Honoré de Balzac

92. “White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.”

— Honoré de Balzac

93. “Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world – the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?”

— Honoré de Balzac

94. “When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.”

— Honoré de Balzac

95. “Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage.”

— Honoré de Balzac

96. “The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.”

— Honoré de Balzac

97. “A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

98. “On the moral plane, true friends enjoy the same protection as the sense of smell confers upon dogs. They scent the sorrow of their friends, they divine its causes, and they clasp it to their minds and hearts.”

— Honoré de Balzac

99. “By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.”

— Honoré de Balzac

100. “Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.”

— Honoré de Balzac