110+ Honore de Balzac Quotes on the Complexities of Human Psychology

Honore de Balzac was a French novelist who is widely considered to be one of the founders of realism in European literature. He wrote a large number of works, including novels, plays, and essays, and is known for his highly detailed depictions of French society during the 19th century. His most famous works are the La Comédie Humaine series, which consists of 91 novels and short stories. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Honore de Balzac on love, literature, social observation.

Top 10 Honore De Balzac Quotes

1. True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
2. Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
3. Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
4. The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
5. In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
6. When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
7. From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.
8. The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done.
9. All happiness depends on courage and work.
10. True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.

Honore de Balzac Image Quotes

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls. — Honore de Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work. — Honore de Balzac

Vivacity is the health of the spirit. — Honore de Balzac

A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself. — Honore de Balzac

Honore De Balzac Short Quotes

• Vivacity is the health of the spirit.
• A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
• No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
• Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.
• Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
• We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
• Cruelty and fear shake hands together.
• As a rule, only the poor are generous.
• The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
• An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

Honore de Balzac Quotes About Love

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. — Honore de Balzac

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love. — Honore de Balzac

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one. — Honore de Balzac

Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face. — Honore de Balzac

Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table. — Honore de Balzac

The more you judge, the less you love. — Honore de Balzac

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

Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from. — Honore de Balzac

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside. — Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac Quotes About Marriage

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time. — Honore de Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul. — Honore de Balzac

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. — Honore de Balzac

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband. — Honore de Balzac

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. — Honore de Balzac

To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely. — Honore de Balzac

Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest. — Honore de Balzac

Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit. — Honore de Balzac

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. — Honore de Balzac

Among even the happiest married couples there are always moments of regret. — Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac Quotes About Life

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition. — Honore de Balzac

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

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. — Honore de Balzac

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history. — Honore de Balzac

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives. — Honore de Balzac

The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics. — 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

Do you know what is the hardest thing in life? To make a choice. — Honore de Balzac

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. — Honore de Balzac

All human beings go through a previous life... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds? — Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac Quotes About Pleasure

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure. — Honore de Balzac

Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it. — Honore de Balzac

We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing. — Honore de Balzac

For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy? — Honore de Balzac

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. — Honore de Balzac

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance. — Honore de Balzac

Nothing can afford a woman greater pleasure than to hear tender words of love. The strictest, most devout woman will listen even if she must not answer. — Honore de Balzac

Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves! — Honore de Balzac

How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer. — Honore de Balzac

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink. — Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac Quotes About People

Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. — Honore de Balzac

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence. — Honore de Balzac

Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones. — Honore de Balzac

As a rule, only the poor are generous. Rich people can always find excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relative. — Honore de Balzac

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich. — Honore de Balzac

In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke. — Honore de Balzac

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. — Honore de Balzac

For certain people, misfortune is a beacon that lights up the dark and baser sides of social life. — Honore de Balzac

If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible. — Honore de Balzac

In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is. — Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac Famous Quotes And Sayings

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls. — Honore de Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work. — Honore de Balzac

A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself. — Honore de Balzac

How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy! — Honore de Balzac

Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion. — Honore de Balzac

A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once. — Honore de Balzac

The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs. — Honore de Balzac

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins. — Honore de Balzac

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself. — 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

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

Every moment of happiness requires a great amount of Ignorance — Honore de Balzac

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

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. — Honore de Balzac

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute. — Honore de Balzac

In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady. — Honore de Balzac

Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.' — Honore de Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all. — Honore de Balzac

The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man. — Honore de Balzac

Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man — Honore de Balzac

Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness. — Honore de Balzac

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true. — Honore de Balzac

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies. — Honore de Balzac

All human power is a compound of time and patience. — Honore de Balzac

To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect. — Honore de Balzac

It is quite right what they say: the three most beautiful sights in the world are a ship in full sail, a galloping horse, and a woman dancing. — Honore de Balzac

Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy. — Honore de Balzac

What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk. — Honore de Balzac

Modesty is the conscience of the body. — Honore de Balzac

Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right. — Honore de Balzac

Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns. — Honore de Balzac

When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army — Honore de Balzac

Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows. — Honore de Balzac

You may imitate, but never counterfeit. — Honore de Balzac

Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart like a viper in its hole. — Honore de Balzac

A mother who is really a mother is never free. — Honore de Balzac

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything. — Honore de Balzac

Does anyone know where these gondolas of Paris come from? [Fr., Ne sait on pas ou viennent ces gondoles Parisiennes?] — Honore de Balzac

The prodigality of millionaires is comparable only to their greed of gain. Let some whim or passion seize them and money is of no account. In fact these Croesuses find whims and passions harder to come by than gold. — Honore de Balzac

The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy. — Honore de Balzac

God is the author, men are only the players. These grand pieces which are played upon earth have been composed in heaven. — Honore de Balzac

As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle. — Honore de Balzac

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. — Honore de Balzac

It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence. — Honore de Balzac

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. — Honore de Balzac

Temperament is the thermometer of character. — Honore de Balzac

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy. — Honore de Balzac

Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide. — Honore de Balzac

Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers. — Honore de Balzac

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. — Honore de Balzac

Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness. — Honore de Balzac

By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct. — Honore de Balzac

Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy. — Honore de Balzac

They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding. — Honore de Balzac

Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind. — Honore de Balzac

Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact. — Honore de Balzac

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race. — Honore de Balzac

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred. — Honore de Balzac

What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor? — Honore de Balzac

In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman. — Honore de Balzac

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it. — Honore de Balzac

With monuments as with men, position means everything. — Honore de Balzac

Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons. — Honore de Balzac

Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular! — Honore de Balzac

Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable. — Honore de Balzac

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. — Honore de Balzac

Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation. — Honore de Balzac

Life Lessons by Honore de Balzac

1. Honore de Balzac taught the importance of hard work and dedication, emphasizing that success only comes from consistent effort.
2. He also highlighted the power of setting goals and striving to achieve them, showing that ambition and determination can lead to great success.
3. Lastly, he demonstrated the importance of perseverance and resilience, showing that even in the face of adversity, one can still succeed with enough dedication and effort.