Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour." - Meaning and context.">
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.
 • Ch. III: At Thirty Years
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Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour.

— Honoré de Balzac

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Les femmes tiennent et doivent toutes tenir à être honorées, car sans l'estime elles n'existent plus. Aussi est-ce le premier sentiment qu'elles demandent à l'amour." in the context of "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.
 • Ch. III: At Thirty Years" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "Honoré de Balzac" (Quotes, A Woman of Thirty (1842)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Honoré de Balzac

About Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist. Along with Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature.