Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn’t even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.”

— Honoré de Balzac

306. “Heaven should be kind to stupid people, for no one else can be consistently.”

— Honoré de Balzac

307. “All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

309. “When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.”

— Honoré de Balzac

310. “In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman.”

— Honoré de Balzac

311. “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

312. “Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.”

— Honoré de Balzac

313. “Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.”

— Honoré de Balzac

314. “Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them.”

— Honoré de Balzac

315. “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

316. “Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God’s very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.”

— Honoré de Balzac

317. “The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

318. “A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her.”

— Honoré de Balzac

319. “Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.”

— Honoré de Balzac

320. “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

321. “Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise.”

— Honoré de Balzac

322. “There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

323. “A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.”

— Honoré de Balzac

324. “Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.”

— Honoré de Balzac

325. “I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.”

— Honoré de Balzac

326. “Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.”

— Honoré de Balzac

327. “As a rule, only the poor are generous.”

— Honoré de Balzac

328. “Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.”

— Honoré de Balzac

329. “I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.”

— Honoré de Balzac

330. “Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?”

— Honoré de Balzac

331. “In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

333. “A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.”

— Honoré de Balzac

334. “Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l’habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.”

— Honoré de Balzac

335. “A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man.”

— Honoré de Balzac

336. “Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.”

— Honoré de Balzac

337. “The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.”

— Honoré de Balzac

338. “Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.”

— Honoré de Balzac

339. “It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.”

— Honoré de Balzac

340. “A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.”

— Honoré de Balzac

341. “My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.”

— Honoré de Balzac

342. “God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.”

— Honoré de Balzac

343. “Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.”

— Honoré de Balzac

344. “Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps.”

— Honoré de Balzac

345. “A girl’s coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman’s coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man’s vanity, the novice responds but to one.”

— Honoré de Balzac

346. “Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.”

— Honoré de Balzac

347. “Society proceeds like the ocean. After a disaster, it resume its wonted level and rhythms; its devouring interests efface all traces of damage.”

— Honoré de Balzac

348. “Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit.”

— Honoré de Balzac

349. “Love or hatred must constantly increase between two persons who are always together; every moment fresh reasons are found for loving or hating better.”

— Honoré de Balzac

350. “Men are so made that they can resist sound argument, and yet yield to a glance.”

— Honoré de Balzac