HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XX

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

There are those whose character is like a chestnut without a kernel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: character


Between two beings susceptible of love, the duration of passion is in proportion to the original resistance of the woman, or to the obstacles which the accidents of social life put in the way of your happiness.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: happiness


If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps will not last more than three nights.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself.

HONORE DE BALZAC

La Comédie Humaine

Tags: manners


Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colors employed in painting.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: light


A woman's life begins with her first passion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: life


Here, the hearers receiving a musical impression do not work it out in themselves, as religion bids us work out the texts of Scripture in prayer. Hence it is very difficult to make them understand that there is in nature an eternal melody, exquisitely sweet, a perfect harmony, disturbed only by revolutions independent of the divine will, as passions are uncontrolled by the will of men.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: work


She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Magic Skin

Tags: marriage


The final life, the fruition of all other lives, to which the powers of the soul have tended, and whose merits open the Sacred Portals to perfected man, is the life of Prayer.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: life


So thorough an old maid as Sylvie was certain to make good progress in the way of salvation.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: progress


An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so little success attended the first.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: God


In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once it is passed.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Les Célibataires

Tags: passion


"Women," she said, with tears in her eyes, "can only love; men act; they have a thousand ways in which they are bound to act. But we can only think, and pray, and worship."

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: Men


Men, born doubtless to be beautiful—for all creatures have a relative beauty—are enrolled from their childhood beneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: childhood


When a woman utters the name of a man but twice a day, there is perhaps some uncertainty about her feelings toward him—but if thrice?—Oh! oh!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Further, we acknowledge that, to the credit of our age, we meet, ever since the revival of morality and religion and during our own times, some women, here and there, so moral, so religious, so devoted to their duties, so upright, so precise, so stiff, so virtuous, so--that the devil himself dare not even look at them; they are guarded on all sides by rosaries, hours of prayer and directors. Pshaw!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: age