Top 500 Honoré de Balzac Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Tradesmen regard an author with a mixed feeling of terror, compassion and curiosity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

402. “Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.”

— Honoré de Balzac

403. “Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.”

— Honoré de Balzac

404. “Let passion reach a catastrophe and it submits us to an intoxicating force far more powerful than the niggardly irritation of wine or of opium. The lucidity our ideas then achieve, and the delicacy of our overly exalted sensations, produce the strangest and most unexpected effects.”

— Honoré de Balzac

405. “Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.”

— Honoré de Balzac

406. “It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.”

— Honoré de Balzac

407. “One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l’Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.”

— Honoré de Balzac

408. “The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others – existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

411. “Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.”

— Honoré de Balzac

412. “Art’s greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.”

— Honoré de Balzac

413. “Does not any limit imposed upon one inspire a desire to go beyond it? Does not our keenest suffering arise when our free will is crossed?”

— Honoré de Balzac

414. “All we are is in the soul.”

— Honoré de Balzac

415. “The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn.”

— Honoré de Balzac

416. “A woman questions the man who loves exactly as a judge questions a criminal. This being so, a flash of the eye, a mere word, an inflection of the voice or a moment’s hesitation suffice to expose the fact, betrayal or crime he is attempting to conceal.”

— Honoré de Balzac

417. “A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.”

— Honoré de Balzac

418. “Chance, my dear, is the sovereign deity in child-bearing.”

— Honoré de Balzac

419. “Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.”

— Honoré de Balzac

420. “Love and work have the virtues of making a man pretty indifferent to anything else.”

— Honoré de Balzac

421. “The monotony of provincial life attracts the attention of people to the kitchen. You do not dine as luxuriously in the provinces as in Paris, but you dine better, because the dishes serve you are the result of mediation and study.”

— Honoré de Balzac

422. “Gratitude is a fool’s word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.”

— Honoré de Balzac

423. “In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.”

— Honoré de Balzac

424. “One exits with one’s husband – one lives with one’s lover.”

— Honoré de Balzac

425. “All men can bear a familiar, definite misfortune better than the cruel alternations of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive joy or sorrow.”

— Honoré de Balzac

426. “It’s catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.”

— Honoré de Balzac

427. “When she lives at his palace, the maiden niece of a bishop can pass for a respectable woman because, if she has a love affair, she is obliged to hoodwink her uncle.”

— Honoré de Balzac

428. “Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?”

— Honoré de Balzac

429. “Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!”

— Honoré de Balzac

430. “Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.”

— Honoré de Balzac

431. “The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.”

— Honoré de Balzac

432. “A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.”

— Honoré de Balzac

433. “We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.”

— Honoré de Balzac

434. “Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?”

— Honoré de Balzac

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

— Honoré de Balzac

436. “Six weeks with a fever is an eternity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

437. “The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.”

— Honoré de Balzac

438. “The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.”

— Honoré de Balzac

439. “Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.”

— Honoré de Balzac

440. “But does not happiness come from the soul within?”

— Honoré de Balzac

441. “For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds.”

— Honoré de Balzac

442. “An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.”

— Honoré de Balzac

443. “The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.”

— Honoré de Balzac

444. “How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!”

— Honoré de Balzac

445. “Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.”

— Honoré de Balzac

446. “In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can.”

— Honoré de Balzac

447. “One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.”

— Honoré de Balzac

448. “Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.”

— Honoré de Balzac

449. “To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.”

— Honoré de Balzac

450. “Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.”

— Honoré de Balzac