French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Eugénie Grandet
Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each other more and more.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Everyday life cannot be cast in heroic mould. No doubt there seems, at any rate at first sight, no room left in this scheme of life for that longing after the infinite which expands the mind and soul. But what is there to prevent me from launching on that boundless sea our familiar craft?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
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.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Le Siècle
Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue, his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live—well, this very man, who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties him to the wheel.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The dark glee, the savage ferocity aroused by the possession of a few water-white pebbles, set me shuddering. I was dumb with amazement.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
HONORE DE BALZAC
"Letters of Two Brides", The Wisdom of Balzac
The men of science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them strikes their attention. Their unhappiness is consummated; in full light of noon they scarcely even perceive it. Oh happy men! a thousand times happy! Example: Beauzee, returning home after session at the Academy, surprises his wife with a German. "Did not I tell you, madame, that it was necessary that I shall go," cried the stranger. "My dear sir," interrupted the academician, "you ought to say that I should go!"
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Who would not at the present moment wish to retain the persuasion that wives are virtuous? Are they not the supreme flower of the country? Are they not all blooming creatures, fascinating the world by their beauty, their youth, their life and their love? To believe in their virtue is a sort of social religion, for they are the ornament of the world, and form the chief glory of France.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A long future requires a long past.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Le catechisme social
A woman's thought is endowed with incredible elasticity. When she receives a knockdown blow, she bends, seems crushed, and then renews her natural shape in a given time.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If love is a child, passion is a man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Make another failure like that ... and you'll be immortal.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
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
The Girl with the Golden Eyes