HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIX

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

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


If love is a child, passion is a man.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


I went to bed sorrowful, and I still suffer from the shock produced by this first collision of my frank, joyous nature with the harsh laws of society. Already the highway hedges are flecked with my white wool!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: nature


How mad a man must appear when desire renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: desire


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


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


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: light


Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of one woman only!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: conscience


The girl of the golden eyes might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they made.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: pleasure


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


Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


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


If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot


If a man would have the right to make stepping-stones of all the heads which crowd a drawing-room, he must be the lover of some artistic woman of fashion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fashion


Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: courtesy


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


A woman's life begins with her first passion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: life


A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: France


A lover has all the good points and all the bad points which are lacking in a husband.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: soul