Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

353. “Our souls possess the unknown power of extending as well as contracting space.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

355. “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

356. “Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.”

— Honoré de Balzac

357. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

363. “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

364. “In the silence of their studios, busied for days at a time with works which leave the mind relatively free, painters become like women; their thoughts can revolve around the minor facts of life and penetrate their hidden meaning.”

— Honoré de Balzac

365. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

367. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

368. “Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

371. “Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.”

— Honoré de Balzac

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Honoré de Balzac

378. “If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.”

— Honoré de Balzac

379. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

383. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

390. “Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

392. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

396. “Life is simply what out feelings do to us.”

— Honoré de Balzac

397. “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

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

— Honoré de Balzac

399. “He who best knows the world will love it least.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac