Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Necessity is often the spur to genius.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

253. “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

254. “If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment – giving to that word its exact significance.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

266. “True love rules especially through memory.”

— Honoré de Balzac

267. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

270. “What is art? Nature concentrated.”

— Honoré de Balzac

271. “We love because we love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

272. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

274. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

276. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

288. “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

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. “Love which economizes is never true love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

294. “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

295. “When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.”

— Honoré de Balzac

296. “Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes.”

— 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. “To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

300. “The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.”

— Honoré de Balzac