Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.”

— Honoré de Balzac

252. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

255. “Those who spend too fast never grow rich.”

— Honoré de Balzac

256. “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

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

— 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. “True love rules especially through memory.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

266. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

268. “We love because we love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

276. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

278. “What is art? Nature concentrated.”

— Honoré de Balzac

279. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

281. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

293. “Though your vulgarian does not readily admit that feelings can change overnight, certainly two lovers often part far more abruptly than they came together.”

— Honoré de Balzac

294. “Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.”

— Honoré de Balzac

295. “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

296. “Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

297. “At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.”

— Honoré de Balzac

298. “Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.”

— Honoré de Balzac

299. “Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?”

— Honoré de Balzac

300. “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