HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES X

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

You are a woman, and you can certainly win a priest to your interests.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours


Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but well understood coquetry?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: modesty


Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: wealth


Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


Have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being? have they a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to our minds in the union of a Material universe and a Spiritual universe,—a creation visible, ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible, imponderable, intangible; completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives equally from the one and from the other! Let us mingle in one world these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but conjoined by fact.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: universe


In these times, liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: liberty


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

Tags: anger


Nature has favored our sex in giving us a choice between love and motherhood. I have made mine. My children shall be my gods, and this spot of earth my Eldorado.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: children


There are husbands, tall and of superior intellect, whose wives have lovers who are ugly, short, or stupid.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: lovers


Physical love is a craving like hunger, excepting that man eats all the time, and in love his appetite is neither so persistent nor so regular as at the table. A piece of bread and a carafe of water will satisfy the hunger of any man; but our civilization has brought to light the science of gastronomy. Love has its piece of bread, but it has also its science of loving, that science which we call coquetry, a delightful word which the French alone possess, for that science originated in this country.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: science


To sum up, the world is mine without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest hold on me.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: effort


Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human feelings, which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the weapons of which they are victims. They have the instinct of love, because it is their whole life, and of jealousy, because it is almost the only means by which they can control us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: art


Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: conversation


A man may be put to death by a thought.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: death


Yes, Prayer--the aspiration of the soul freed absolutely from the body--bears all forces within it, and applies them to the constant and perseverant union of the Visible and the Invisible. When you possess the faculty of praying without weariness, with love, with force, with certainty, with intelligence, your spiritualized nature will presently be invested with power. Like a rushing wind, like a thunderbolt, it cuts its way through all things and shares the power of God.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: power


The good man signed the papers with the innocence of a child who does what his mother orders without question.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: innocence


A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: marriage


The Spirit of Love has acquired strength, the result of all vanquished terrestrial passions.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


Humble country pleasures will enliven the monotony of my future. It shall be my ambition to enlarge the oasis round my house, and to give it the lordly shade of fine trees. My turf, though Provencal, shall be always green.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: ambition


Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Romans et contes philosophiques

Tags: gambling