HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XVI

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

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


Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: genius


Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

HONORE DE BALZAC

attributed, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources

Tags: misfortune


Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain them.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: life


A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


All the sensations which a woman yields to her lover, she gives in exchange; they return to her always intensified; they are as rich in what they give as in what they receive. This is the kind of commerce in which almost all husbands end by being bankrupt.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


I longed for a companion to the kingdom of Light; I wished to show you that morsel of mud, I find you bound to it.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: genius


Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each other more and more.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: love


The girl of the golden eyes might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they made.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: pleasure


Man himself is not a finished creation; if he were, God would not Be.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


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


Perhaps the mind cannot be complete at all points; perhaps artists of every kind live too much in the present moment to study the future; perhaps they are too observant of the ridiculous to notice snares, or they may believe that none would dare to lay a snare for such as they.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: artists


Yesterday, at the Italian Opera, I could feel some one was looking at me; my eyes were drawn, as by a magnet, to two wells of fire, gleaming like carbuncles in a dim corner of the orchestra. Henarez never moved his eyes from me. The wretch had discovered the one spot from which he could see me—and there he was. I don't know what he may be as a politician, but for love he has a genius.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: genius


A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.

HONORE DE BALZAC

A Woman of Thirty

Tags: women


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

HONORE DE BALZAC

Ferragus

Tags: fantasy


A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Le catechisme social

Tags: atheism


Men are like that, they can resist sound argument, yet yield to a glance.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

"Le Contrat de mariage", Scènes de la vie privée

Tags: men


There are, without counting grocers and drapers, so many people who, to kill time, occupy themselves in seeking for the hidden motives which direct women's actions, that it is a work of charity to classify by titles and in chapters all the private circumstances of marriage; a good index will enable them to put their finger on the motions of their wives' hearts, just as logarithmic tables give them the product of any two numbers.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: charity


There are those whose character is like a chestnut without a kernel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: character