HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIX

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)


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Nevertheless, there is in Paris a proportion of privileged beings to whom this excessive movement of industries, interests, affairs, arts, and gold is profitable. These beings are women. Although they also have a thousand secret causes which, here more than elsewhere, destroy their physiognomy, there are to be found in the feminine world little happy colonies, who live in Oriental fashion and can preserve their beauty; but these women rarely show themselves on foot in the streets, they lie hid like rare plants who only unfold their petals at certain hours, and constitute veritable exotic exceptions.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC
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The Girl with the Golden Eyes


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Tags: women


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


Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: tyranny


It is very humiliating that no adorer has yet turned up for me. I am a marriageable girl, but I have brothers, a family, relations, who are sensitive on the point of honor. Ah! if that is what keeps men back, they are poltroons.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: family


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


If many man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from lack of willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to undergo the toils of this terrible duel, it is quite true that they must needs possess great moral force.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: talent


Feeble folk are as easily reassured as they are frightened.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours


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


All the sensations which a woman yields to her lover, she gives in exchange; they return to her always intensified; they are as rich in what they give as in what they receive. This is the kind of commerce in which almost all husbands end by being bankrupt.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Yesterday, at the Italian Opera, I could feel some one was looking at me; my eyes were drawn, as by a magnet, to two wells of fire, gleaming like carbuncles in a dim corner of the orchestra. Henarez never moved his eyes from me. The wretch had discovered the one spot from which he could see me—and there he was. I don't know what he may be as a politician, but for love he has a genius.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: genius


There is no good fete without a morrow.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve


The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: question


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


Silliness has two ways of comporting itself; it talks, or is silent. Silent silliness can be borne.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette


People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Modeste Mignon

Tags: happiness


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


Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: destiny


Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this investigation for the next century to carry out.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


In the terrific tumult of raving passions, the holy Voice would have been unheard.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara


If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: civilization