Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

202. “In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.”

— Honoré de Balzac

203. “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

— Honoré de Balzac

204. “A monster which devours everything – that is familiarity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

205. “Kindness steers no easy course. Attributing it to character, we seldom recognize the secret efforts of a noble heart, whereas we reward really wicked people for the evil they refrain from committing.”

— Honoré de Balzac

206. “What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?”

— Honoré de Balzac

207. “It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.”

— Honoré de Balzac

208. “Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

209. “Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.”

— Honoré de Balzac

210. “The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.”

— Honoré de Balzac

211. “Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.”

— Honoré de Balzac

212. “The duration of a couple’s passion is in proportion to the woman’s original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

213. “Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

214. “Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.”

— Honoré de Balzac

215. “A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.”

— Honoré de Balzac

216. “Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.”

— Honoré de Balzac

217. “The prodigality of millionaires is comparable only to their greed of gain. Let some whim or passion seize them and money is of no account. In fact these Croesuses find whims and passions harder to come by than gold.”

— Honoré de Balzac

218. “Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.”

— Honoré de Balzac

219. “A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.”

— Honoré de Balzac

220. “As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature – in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing – he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.”

— Honoré de Balzac

221. “There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.”

— Honoré de Balzac

222. “Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.”

— Honoré de Balzac

223. “With a woman, always make good use of a secret. She will be proportionally grateful to you, like a scoundrel who grants his respect to an honest man he has been unable to swindle.”

— Honoré de Balzac

224. “In France we can cauterize wounds but we do not yet know any remedy for the injuries inflicted by a bon mot.”

— Honoré de Balzac

225. “Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.”

— Honoré de Balzac

226. “Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man’s appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.”

— Honoré de Balzac

227. “Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.”

— Honoré de Balzac

228. “Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.”

— Honoré de Balzac

229. “Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.”

— Honoré de Balzac

230. “The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.”

— Honoré de Balzac

231. “Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.”

— Honoré de Balzac

232. “Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.”

— Honoré de Balzac

233. “Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.”

— Honoré de Balzac

234. “Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man.”

— Honoré de Balzac

235. “We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.”

— Honoré de Balzac

236. “Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”

— Honoré de Balzac

237. “Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.”

— Honoré de Balzac

238. “Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

239. “A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.”

— Honoré de Balzac

240. “A mother who is really a mother is never free.”

— Honoré de Balzac

241. “The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.”

— Honoré de Balzac

242. “Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

243. “For avarice begins where poverty ends.”

— Honoré de Balzac

244. “Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.”

— Honoré de Balzac

245. “Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

246. “If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool’s notion of history.”

— Honoré de Balzac

247. “The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.”

— Honoré de Balzac

248. “Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.”

— Honoré de Balzac

249. “Necessity is often the spur to genius.”

— Honoré de Balzac

250. “If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”

— Honoré de Balzac