Top 676 Quotes & Sayings by Honore de Balzac - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Honore de Balzac.

Last updated on April 20, 2025.

Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

Conscience is our unerring judge until we finally stifle it.

Honore de Balzac

A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.

Honore de Balzac

The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.

Honore de Balzac

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

Honore de Balzac

Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.

Honore de Balzac

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Honore de Balzac

A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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.

Honore de Balzac

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Honore de Balzac

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

Honore de Balzac

Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Honore de Balzac

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Honore de Balzac

A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Those who spend too fast never grow rich.

Honore de Balzac

Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyment have been intellectual joys.

Honore de Balzac

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

Honore de Balzac

Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.

Honore de Balzac

The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

Honore de Balzac

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

Honore de Balzac

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.

Honore de Balzac

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

Honore de Balzac

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

Honore de Balzac

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Honore de Balzac

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Honore de Balzac

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.

Honore de Balzac

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.

Honore de Balzac

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

Honore de Balzac

Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.

Honore de Balzac

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.

Honore de Balzac