Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns.”

— Honoré de Balzac

352. “The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical.”

— Honoré de Balzac

353. “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

354. “We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.”

— Honoré de Balzac

355. “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

356. “I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense.”

— Honoré de Balzac

357. “The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.”

— Honoré de Balzac

358. “What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?”

— Honoré de Balzac

359. “Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.”

— Honoré de Balzac

360. “Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.”

— Honoré de Balzac

361. “If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.”

— Honoré de Balzac

362. “Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.”

— Honoré de Balzac

363. “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

364. “Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.”

— Honoré de Balzac

365. “Journalists grow accustomed to seeing evil and they let it pass; they proceed to approve it, and they end by committing it themselves.”

— Honoré de Balzac

366. “To man, faith; to woman, doubt. She bears the heavier burden. Does not woman invariably suffer for two?”

— Honoré de Balzac

367. “Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.”

— Honoré de Balzac

368. “Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.”

— Honoré de Balzac

369. “When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.”

— Honoré de Balzac

370. “There are words which cut like steel.”

— Honoré de Balzac

371. “It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.”

— Honoré de Balzac

372. “Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.”

— Honoré de Balzac

373. “I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

374. “Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.”

— Honoré de Balzac

375. “All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.”

— Honoré de Balzac

376. “Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.”

— Honoré de Balzac

377. “No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.”

— Honoré de Balzac

378. “Charity is not one of the virtues practiced on the stock market. The heart of a bank is but one of many viscera.”

— Honoré de Balzac

379. “But woman brings disorder into society through passion.”

— Honoré de Balzac

380. “Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.”

— Honoré de Balzac

381. “Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.”

— Honoré de Balzac

382. “A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man’s appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.”

— Honoré de Balzac

383. “Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.”

— Honoré de Balzac

384. “She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.”

— Honoré de Balzac

385. “A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.”

— Honoré de Balzac

386. “To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.”

— Honoré de Balzac

387. “Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.”

— Honoré de Balzac

388. “Many of us marvel at the icy insensitivity with which women snuff out their armours. But if they did not blot out the past in this manner, life for them would lose all dignity and they could never resist the fatal familiarities to which they once submitted.”

— Honoré de Balzac

389. “To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.”

— Honoré de Balzac

390. “Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences.”

— Honoré de Balzac

391. “Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

392. “Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.”

— Honoré de Balzac

393. “When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.”

— Honoré de Balzac

394. “A woman’s sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.”

— Honoré de Balzac

395. “While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.”

— Honoré de Balzac

396. “What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?”

— Honoré de Balzac

397. “How can we explain the perpetuity of envy – a vice which yields no return?”

— Honoré de Balzac

398. “Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.”

— Honoré de Balzac

399. “There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.”

— Honoré de Balzac

400. “But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.”

— Honoré de Balzac