HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

Make another failure like that ... and you'll be immortal.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: failure


To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: law


Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: tyranny


The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: soul


Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

HONORE DE BALZAC

attributed, Words of Wisdom: Honore de Balzac

Tags: solitude


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 men of science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them strikes their attention. Their unhappiness is consummated; in full light of noon they scarcely even perceive it. Oh happy men! a thousand times happy! Example: Beauzee, returning home after session at the Academy, surprises his wife with a German. "Did not I tell you, madame, that it was necessary that I shall go," cried the stranger. "My dear sir," interrupted the academician, "you ought to say that I should go!"

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: Men


The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fool


The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fate


If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: sun


We find in the unexplorable nature of the Spiritual World certain beings armed with these wondrous faculties, comparable only to the terrible power of certain gases in the physical world, beings who combine with other beings, penetrate them as active agents, and produce upon them witchcrafts, charms, against which these helpless slaves are wholly defenseless; they are, in fact, enchanted, brought under subjection, reduced to a condition of dreadful vassalage. Such mysterious beings overpower others with the scepter and the glory of a superior nature,—acting upon them at times like the torpedo which electrifies or paralyzes the fisherman, at other times like a dose of phosphorous which stimulates life and accelerates its propulsion; or again, like opium, which puts to sleep corporeal nature, disengages the spirit from every bond, enables it to float above the world and shows this earth to the spiritual eye as through a prism, extracting from it the food most needed.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


Woman understands all things through love; what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees; when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: grace


Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: prayer


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: women


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

Tags: flowers


What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Ferragus

Tags: fantasy


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

Tags: love


All human power is a compound of time and patience.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Eugénie Grandet

Tags: power


Thoughts of adultery do not take possession of the heart of a married woman all at once, like a shot from a pistol.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: adultery