HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XXII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

To call a desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of itself.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: desire


We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from stupidity, for it is acknowledged that in love all women have intellect.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: women


Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: power


What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

HONORE DE BALZAC

Lost Illusions

Tags: art


The music of the Opera enchants me; and whilst my soul is plunged in divine pleasure, I am the centre of admiration and the focus of all the opera-glasses. But a single glance will make the boldest youth drop his eyes.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: opera


All ends in God; and many are the ways to find Him by walking straight before us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: walking


The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man is never vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take the means to please her that a husband would recoil from.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: lies


God makes no mistake in His judgments, Madame; I recognize no tribunal but His.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: mistake


Unite a fine intelligence with a dwarfed intelligence and you precipitate a disaster; for it is necessary that equilibrium be preserved in everything.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: intelligence


It is very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and mingling with this reliance the convenient maxims of the fashionable world, she takes as her guide while under the control of those desires which everything conspires to excite, her own deluding fancies, which prove a guide all the more treacherous, because a young girl rarely ever confides to another the secret thoughts of her first love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: the present


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


Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot


In short, the terrible Raoul is grotesque. His movements are jerky, as if produced by imperfect machinery; his gait rejects all idea of order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and boulevards of Paris. His conversation, full of caustic humor, of bitter satire, follows the gait of his body; suddenly it abandons its tone of vengeance and turns sweet, poetic, consoling, gentle, without apparent reason; he falls into inexplicable silences, or turns somersets of wit, which at times are somewhat wearying. In society, he is boldly awkward, and exhibits a contempt for conventions and a critical air about things respected which makes him unpleasant to narrow minds, and also to those who strive to preserve the doctrines of old-fashioned, gentlemanly politeness; but for all that there is a sort of lawless originality about him which women do not dislike. Besides, to them, he is often most amiably courteous; he seems to take pleasure in making them forget his personal singularities, and thus obtains a victory over antipathies which flatters either his vanity, his self-love, or his pride.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: contempt


In bringing God face to face with the Great Whole, we see that only two states are possible between them,—either God and Matter are contemporaneous, or God existed alone before Matter. Were Reason—the light that has guided the human race from the dawn of its existence—accumulated in one brain, even that mighty brain could not invent a third mode of being without suppressing both Matter and God.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong to love me. What! am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of all species, that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me! No, we can never come to terms.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They are silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see nothing.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: family


To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she is operating in your interest or in that of your wife.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: honesty


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


Talent in love, as in every other art, consists in the power of forming a conception combined with the power of carrying it out.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: power


You should let your wife recline all day long on soft armchairs, in which she sinks into a veritable bath of eiderdown or feathers; you should encourage in every way that does no violence to your conscience, the inclination which women have to breathe no other air but the scented atmosphere of a chamber seldom opened, where daylight can scarcely enter through the soft, transparent curtains.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: conscience