French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Suicide, moreover, was at that time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Canst thou comprehend, my poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost power can scarcely endure in dreams the burning communications of the Spirit?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The bed is the whole of marriage.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Infuse with passion, then, if you will, this friendship, and let the voice of love disturb its calm.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Perhaps it is necessary to have been, like Nebuchadnezzar, something of a wild beast, and shut up in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes without other prey than the butcher’s meat doled out by the keeper, or a retired merchant deprived of the joys of tormenting his clerks, to understand the impatience with which the brother and sister awaited the arrival of their cousin Lorrain.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
When there is an old maid in a house, watch-dogs are unnecessary; not the slightest event can occur that she does not see and comment upon and pursue to its utmost consequences.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
Felix’s wife began to find monotony in an Eden so well arranged; the perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the fold. Such, judging by the history of ages, appears to be the meaning of that emblematic serpent to which Eve listened, in all probability, out of ennui.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Most composers make use of the orchestral parts in a vague, incoherent way, combining them for a merely temporary effect; they do not persistently contribute to the whole mass of the movement by their steady and regular progress. Beethoven assigns its part to each tone-quality from the first. Like the various companies which, by their disciplined movements, contribute to winning a battle, the orchestral parts of a symphony by Beethoven obey the plan ordered for the interest of all, and are subordinate to an admirably conceived scheme.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The wife of a banker is always an honest woman, but the woman who sits at the cashier’s desk cannot be one, unless her husband has a very large business and she does not live over his shop.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot