HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives its epistolary provender from all hands.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


A husband will be best avenged by his wife's lover.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


If a man strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he strike his wife it is suicide!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: suicide


Let the man whom I deign to love beware how he thinks of anything but loving me!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: love


A good mind protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: experience


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

Tags: life


I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832

Tags: writing


Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are more numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than the caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences of our own life have revealed to us on the subject of love, arms us celibates with a terrible power: we are the lion of the Gospel seeking whom we may devour.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


When two human beings are united by pleasure, all social conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes, excepting at the due season.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: words


A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides


For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Les Célibataires

Tags: passion


Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: gold


A woman's life begins with her first passion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: life


In the matter of repartees literary celebrities are often not as quick as women.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: women


In a moment he had poured out a thousand foolish words to her, with the rapidity of a torrent coursing between the rocks, and repeating the same sound in a thousand different forms.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: words


Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


She is dying, like a flower wilted by the burning sun.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: sun


Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: language