French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Most composers make use of the orchestral parts in a vague, incoherent way, combining them for a merely temporary effect; they do not persistently contribute to the whole mass of the movement by their steady and regular progress. Beethoven assigns its part to each tone-quality from the first. Like the various companies which, by their disciplined movements, contribute to winning a battle, the orchestral parts of a symphony by Beethoven obey the plan ordered for the interest of all, and are subordinate to an admirably conceived scheme.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls, their lives.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
An honest woman ought to be in a financial condition such as forbids her lover to think she will ever cost him anything.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that height of devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the garments of the saints.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Thieves, spies, lovers, diplomats, and slaves of any kind alone know the resources and comforts of a glance. They alone know what it contains of meaning, sweetness, thought, anger, villainy, displayed by the modification of that ray of light which conveys the soul.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him; he would not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the comfortless look of the room.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The Spirit of Love has acquired strength, the result of all vanquished terrestrial passions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The exercise of thought, whatever people may say, is more noble than the exercise of bodily organs, and we give precedence to science over cookery and to intellectual training over hygiene.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Suicide, moreover, was at that time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Of all the miseries that civil war can bring upon a country the greatest lies in the appeal which one of the contestants always ends by making to some foreign government.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest admiration.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
As I took my leave of her, I caught a gleam of hate and rage in her eyes that made me shudder. We parted enemies. She would fain have crushed me out of existence; and for my own part, I felt pity for her, and for some natures pity is the deadliest of insults.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
We think, without fear of being deceived, that married people who have lived twenty years together may sleep in peace without fear of having their love trespassed upon or of incurring the scandal of a lawsuit for criminal conversation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The lawyer, tall and thin, had liberal opinions in place of talent.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
For my part, I like those long trials of the old-fashioned chivalry. That lout of a young lord, who took offence because his sovereign-lady sent him down among the lions to fetch her glove, was, in my opinion, very impertinent, and a fool too. Doubtless the lady had in reserve for him some exquisite flower of love, which he lost, as he well deserved—the puppy!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
At the first introductory notes Gambara’s intoxication appeared to clear away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness. The ruling idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the utter darkness in which he lived. To his unsealed eyes this music revealed the immense horizons of a world in which he found himself for the first time, though recognizing it as that he had seen in his dreams. He fancied himself transported into the scenery of his native land, where that beautiful Italian landscape begins at what Napoleon so cleverly described as the glacis of the Alps. Carried back by memory to the time when his young and eager brain was as yet untroubled by the ecstasy of his too exuberant imagination he listened with religious awe and would not utter a single word. The Count respected the internal travail of his soul. Till half-past twelve Gambara sat so perfectly motionless that the frequenters of the opera house took him, no doubt, for what he was—a man drunk.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Honorine