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Honoré de Balzac on Women

1799–1850 France

← All quotes by Honoré de Balzac

18 quotes

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

Physiology of Marriage (1829)

Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

Le Père Goriot (1835)

There is no character in women’s faces before the age of thirty.

La Femme de trente ans (1842)

Peut-être veulent-elles [les femmes] un peu d'hypocrisie ?

The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)

When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.

Musicians are seldom unemotional; a woman who could sing like that must know how to love indeed.

The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831)

My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."

The Lily of the Valley (1835)

The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.

Physiology of Marriage (1829)

A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.

A Daughter of Eve (1839)

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

A Daughter of Eve (1839)

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

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

A Woman of Thirty (1842)

The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire.

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.

Physiologie du Mariage (1829)

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.

A Woman of Thirty (1842)

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.

Letters of Two Brides (1841)

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.

A Woman of Thirty (1842)

Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way to them.

The Vicar of Tours (1832)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Honoré de Balzac (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.