French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Magic Skin
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
When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
We regard it as an infallible principle that great sweetness of disposition united in a woman with plainness that is not repulsive, form two indubitable elements of success in securing the greatest possible happiness to the home.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence, and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
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
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Le catechisme social
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
Man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Man himself is not a finished creation; if he were, God would not Be.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita