Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.”

— Honoré de Balzac

252. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

258. “The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

260. “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

261. “Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. Misfortune is a stepping stone for a genius, a piscina for a Christian, a treasure for a man of parts, and an abyss for a weakling.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

263. “True love rules especially through memory.”

— Honoré de Balzac

264. “Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

267. “Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

269. “We love because we love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

270. “What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.”

— Honoré de Balzac

271. “Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.”

— Honoré de Balzac

272. “Nothing is as heady as the wine of misfortune.”

— Honoré de Balzac

273. “Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.”

— Honoré de Balzac

274. “What is art? Nature concentrated.”

— Honoré de Balzac

275. “France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same.”

— Honoré de Balzac

276. “To lese-majeste and contempt of court, we must add the crime of lese-million, that fearful indignity we visit on the rich when we expose the impotence of gold.”

— Honoré de Balzac

277. “The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.”

— Honoré de Balzac

278. “The winter’s frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.”

— Honoré de Balzac

279. “The innocence of virgins is like milk which turns when exposed to a clap of thunder, to a tart smell, to a hot day, to the merest nothing.”

— Honoré de Balzac

280. “Love which economizes is never true love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

281. “He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.”

— Honoré de Balzac

282. “When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.”

— Honoré de Balzac

283. “Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

284. “The man who enters his wife’s dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.”

— Honoré de Balzac

285. “Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

286. “A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.”

— Honoré de Balzac

287. “Jealousy, an eminently credulous and suspicious passion, allows fancy the greatest possible play. But it does not bestow wit, it banishes all sense.”

— Honoré de Balzac

288. “If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.”

— Honoré de Balzac

289. “Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.”

— Honoré de Balzac

290. “For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.”

— Honoré de Balzac

291. “In smart society men are jealous of one another after the fashion of women.”

— Honoré de Balzac

292. “A woman’s greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man’s generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.”

— Honoré de Balzac

293. “During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.”

— Honoré de Balzac

294. “Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.”

— Honoré de Balzac

295. “Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.”

— Honoré de Balzac

296. “Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?”

— Honoré de Balzac

297. “Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.”

— Honoré de Balzac

298. “How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes! No mother is as caressing or thoughtful towards her adored child as a merchant in hypocrisy toward his milch-cow.”

— Honoré de Balzac

299. “One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.”

— Honoré de Balzac

300. “Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime.”

— Honoré de Balzac