Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

205. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

216. “And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.”

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

— Honoré de Balzac

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

222. “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

223. “For avarice begins where poverty ends.”

— Honoré de Balzac

224. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

227. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

229. “The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.”

— Honoré de Balzac

230. “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

231. “Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

233. “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

234. “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

235. “A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

237. “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

239. “Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.”

— Honoré de Balzac

240. “The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.”

— Honoré de Balzac

241. “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

242. “Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

244. “The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.”

— Honoré de Balzac

245. “Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.”

— Honoré de Balzac

246. “The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.”

— Honoré de Balzac

247. “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

248. “Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.”

— Honoré de Balzac

249. “True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!”

— Honoré de Balzac

250. “To be happy, a man must love his wife as she chooses to be loved.”

— Honoré de Balzac