Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

209. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

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

— 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. “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

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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

223. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

226. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

232. “For avarice begins where poverty ends.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

245. “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

246. “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

247. “It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.”

— Honoré de Balzac

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac