Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.”

— Honoré de Balzac

152. “There are moments in life when all we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at the touch of consoling words, that would reveal the depths of our pain.”

— Honoré de Balzac

153. “Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.”

— Honoré de Balzac

154. “They ended as all great passions do end – by a misunderstanding.”

— Honoré de Balzac

155. “Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.”

— Honoré de Balzac

156. “As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative.”

— Honoré de Balzac

157. “It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.”

— Honoré de Balzac

158. “In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady.”

— Honoré de Balzac

159. “Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

160. “The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.”

— Honoré de Balzac

161. “Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.”

— Honoré de Balzac

162. “Cruelty and fear shake hands together.”

— Honoré de Balzac

163. “From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.”

— Honoré de Balzac

164. “Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

165. “Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.”

— Honoré de Balzac

166. “Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.”

— Honoré de Balzac

167. “People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.”

— Honoré de Balzac

168. “Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

169. “First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.”

— Honoré de Balzac

170. “Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.”

— Honoré de Balzac

171. “Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.”

— Honoré de Balzac

172. “An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband’s infidelities.”

— Honoré de Balzac

173. “Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.”

— Honoré de Balzac

174. “Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!”

— Honoré de Balzac

175. “Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.”

— Honoré de Balzac

176. “Yes, I can understand that a man might go to a gambling table when he sees that all that lies between him and death is his last crown.”

— Honoré de Balzac

177. “We flew back home like swallows. ‘Is it happiness that makes us so light?’ Agathe asked.”

— Honoré de Balzac

178. “The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man.”

— Honoré de Balzac

179. “For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?”

— Honoré de Balzac

180. “Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman’s face.”

— Honoré de Balzac

181. “A Creole woman is like a child, she wants to possess everything immediately; like a child, she would set fire to a house in order to fry an egg. In her languor, she thinks of nothing; when passionately aroused, she thinks of any act possible or impossible.”

— Honoré de Balzac

182. “A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.”

— Honoré de Balzac

183. “Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.”

— Honoré de Balzac

184. “You’re a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You’d make a good catch for the devil.”

— Honoré de Balzac

185. “The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.”

— Honoré de Balzac

186. “The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.”

— Honoré de Balzac

187. “It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.”

— Honoré de Balzac

188. “In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted.”

— Honoré de Balzac

189. “A husband can commit no greater blunder than to discuss his wife, if she is virtuous, with his mistress; unless it be to mention his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife.”

— Honoré de Balzac

190. “Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

191. “Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.”

— Honoré de Balzac

192. “When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.”

— Honoré de Balzac

193. “You may imitate, but never counterfeit.”

— Honoré de Balzac

194. “A man’s own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.”

— Honoré de Balzac

195. “A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.”

— Honoré de Balzac

196. “A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.”

— Honoré de Balzac

197. “Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.”

— Honoré de Balzac

198. “We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.”

— Honoré de Balzac

199. “In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.”

— Honoré de Balzac

200. “The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.”

— Honoré de Balzac