French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
We stand between two policies—either to found the State on the basis of the family, or to rest it on individual interest—in other words, between democracy and aristocracy, between free discussion and obedience, between Catholicism and religious indifference. I am among the few who are resolved to oppose what is called the people, and that in the people's true interest. It is not now a question of feudal rights, as fools are told, nor of rank; it is a question of the State and of the existence of France. The country which does not rest on the foundation of paternal authority cannot be stable. That is the foot of the ladder of responsibility and subordination, which has for its summit the King.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The bed is the whole of marriage.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance, owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The sweetest of all consolations to suffering souls, to martyrs, to artists, in the worst of that divine agony which hatred and envy force upon them, is to meet with praise where they have hitherto found censure and injustice.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
But in the glance at once tender and wild, swift and deep, which that woman’s black eyes had shot at him by stealth, there was such a world of buried sorrows and promised joys!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Infuse with passion, then, if you will, this friendship, and let the voice of love disturb its calm.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
According to the greater or lesser violence of your sensual passion, you have perhaps discerned some of those twenty-two pleasures which in other times created in Greece twenty-two kinds of courtesans, devoted especially to these delicate branches of the same art.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve