French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Correspondence, in which the pen is always bolder than speech, and thought, wreathing itself with flowers, allows itself to be seen without disguise.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Women will not suffer their idol to step down from his pedestal. They do not forgive the slightest pettiness in a god.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Make another failure like that ... and you'll be immortal.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The words fell as the axe of a skillful woodman falls at the root of a young tree and brings it down at a single blow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Though all things in society as well as in the universe are said to have a purpose, there do exist here below certain beings whose purpose and utility seem inexplicable.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Often it is some girl in love, some gray-headed merchant on the verge of bankruptcy, some mother with a son’s wrong-doing to conceal, some starving artist, some great man whose influence is on the wane, and, for lack of money, is like to lose the fruit of all his labors—the power of their pleading has made me shudder. Sublime actors such as these play for me, for an audience of one, and they cannot deceive me. I can look into their inmost thoughts, and read them as God reads them. Nothing is hidden from me. Nothing is refused to the holder of the purse-strings to loose and to bind. I am rich enough to buy the consciences of those who control the action of ministers, from their office boys to their mistresses. Is not that power?—I can possess the fairest women, receive their softest caresses; is not that Pleasure? And is not your whole social economy summed up in terms of Power and Pleasure?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is very humiliating that no adorer has yet turned up for me. I am a marriageable girl, but I have brothers, a family, relations, who are sensitive on the point of honor. Ah! if that is what keeps men back, they are poltroons.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
True, I have my weak points; but were I a man, I should adore them. They arise from what is most promising in me.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
The good man signed the papers with the innocence of a child who does what his mother orders without question.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
When she plays, an actress can live no life of her own; she can neither dress, nor eat, nor talk.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Well, monsieur ... a musician always finds it difficult to reply when the answer needs the cooperation of a hundred skilled executants. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, without an orchestra would be of no great account.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
We cannot measure the vast orbit of the Divine thought of which we are but an atom as small as God is great; but we can feel its vastness, we can kneel, adore, and wait.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler against which all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be possible that lovers have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or raised thee to the skies? O magic headache, O delusive headache, blest be the brain that first invented thee! Shame on the doctor who shall find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the only ill that women bless, doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou dispensest to them, O deceitful headache!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If desire gives a man boldness and disposes him to lay restraint aside, the mistress, under pain of ceasing to be woman, however great may be her love, is afraid of arriving at the end so promptly, and face to face with the necessity of giving herself, which to many women is equivalent to a fall into an abyss, at the bottom of which they know not what they shall find. The involuntary coldness of the woman contrasts with her confessed passion, and necessarily reacts upon the most passionate lover. Thus ideas, which often float around souls like vapors, determine in them a sort of temporary malady. In the sweet journey which two beings undertake through the fair domains of love, this moment is like a waste land to be traversed, a land without a tree, alternatively damp and warm, full of scorching sand, traversed by marshes, which leads to smiling groves clad with roses, where Love and his retinue of pleasures disport themselves on carpets of soft verdure. Often the witty man finds himself afflicted with a foolish laugh which is his only answer to everything; his wit is, as it were, suffocated beneath the icy pressure of his desires. It would not be impossible for two beings of equal beauty, intelligence, and passion to utter at first nothing but the most silly commonplaces, until chance, a word, the tremor of a certain glance, the communication of a spark, should have brought them to the happy transition which leads to that flowery way in which one does not walk, but where one sways and at the same time does not lapse.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
How, alas! are we to explain, while respecting the honor of all the peoples, the problem which results from the fact that three millions of burning hearts can find no more than four hundred thousand women on which they can feed? Should we apportion four celibates for each woman and remember that the honest women would have already established, instinctively and unconsciously, a sort of understanding between themselves and the celibates, like that which the presidents of royal courts have initiated, in order to make their partisans in each chamber enter successively after a certain number of years?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A husband and wife found themselves in love with each other for the first time after twenty-seven years of marriage.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.
HONORE DE BALZAC