French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian, with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth, lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything, consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets, desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with indifference—his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze or glass—as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
When a woman has no friend of her own sex intimate enough to assist her in proving false to marital love, her maid is a last resource which seldom fails in bringing about the desired result.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
What a wretched dramatist Shakespeare is! Othello is in love with glory; he wins battles, he gives orders, he struts about and is all over the place while Desdemona sits at home; and Desdemona, who sees herself neglected for the silly fuss of public life, is quite meek all the time. Such a sheep deserves to be slaughtered.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
The King stands for us all. To die for the King is to die for oneself, for one's family, which, like the kingdom, cannot die.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
I pitied him as I might have pitied a diseased creature. But, at the same time, I knew quite well that while he had millions of francs at his command, he possessed the world no less in idea—that world which he had explored, ransacked, weighed, appraised, and exploited.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Let us leave hearts out of the question. Business is business, and business is not carried on with sentimentality like romances.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Marriage is better known than Barabbas; all the ideas which it calls up have been circulated in our books since the world began, and there is no useful opinion, no absurd scheme, but it finds an author, a printer, a library, and a reader.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The tact with which celibates discover the moment when the breeze begins to rise in a new home can only be compared to the indifference of those husbands for whom the Red-moon rises. There is, even in intrigue, a moment of ripeness which must be waited for. The great man is he who anticipates the outcome of certain circumstances. Men of fifty-two, whom we have represented as being so dangerous, know very well, for example, that any man who offers himself as lover to a woman and is haughtily rejected, will be received with open arms three months afterwards. But it may be truly said that in general married people in betraying their indifference towards each other show the same naiveté with which they first betrayed their love. At the time when you are traversing with madame the ravishing fields of the seventh heaven—where according to their temperament, newly married people remain encamped for a longer or shorter time, as the preceding Meditation has proved—you go little or not at all into society. Happy as you are in your home, if you do go abroad, it will be for the purpose of making up a choice party and visiting the theatre, the country, etc. From the moment you the newly wedded make your appearance in the world again, you and your bride together, or separately, and are seen to be attentive to each other at balls, at parties, at all the empty amusements created to escape the void of an unsatisfied heart, the celibates discern that your wife comes there in search of distraction; her home, her husband are therefore wearisome to her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The Countess sat playing with her children. When she heard my name, she sprang up and came to meet me, then she sat down and pointed without a word to a chair by the fire. Her face wore the inscrutable mask beneath which women of the world conceal their most vehement emotions. Trouble had withered that face already. Nothing of its beauty now remained, save the marvelous outlines in which its principal charm had lain.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Do not therefore allow yourself to be led astray by the specious good nature of such an institution as that of twin beds. It is the silliest, the most treacherous, the most dangerous in the world. Shame and anathema to him who conceived it!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
All that has to do with matters of material existence I leave to my wife.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Marriage is a matter concerning the whole of life, whilst love aims only at pleasure. On the other hand, marriage will remain when pleasures have vanished, and it is the source of interests far more precious than those of the man and woman entering on the alliance.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Those who spend too fast never grow rich.
HONORE DE BALZAC
At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
As ideas are capable of infinite combination, it ought to be the same with pleasures.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Everywhere you find the man of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who torments himself; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
When women are secretly to blame they often show ostensibly the utmost womanly pride. It is a dissimulation of mind for which we ought to be obliged to them. The deception is full of dignity, if not of grandeur.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
What sentiment of admiration must rise in the soul of a philosopher on discovering that there is, perhaps, but one single principle in the world, as there is but one God; and that our ideas and our affections are subject to the same laws which cause the sun to rise, the flowers to bloom, the universe to teem with life!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
La Fausse Maîtresse
Before a woman gives herself entirely up to her lover, she ought to consider well what his love has to offer her. The gift of her esteem and confidence should necessarily precede that of her heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others--existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita