French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
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
Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
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 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
It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by a startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case so manifold.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
However portentous a fact may be, or even supernatural--if such facts exist--however solemnly a miracle may be done in sight of all, the lightning of that fact, the thunderbolt of that miracle is quickly swallowed up in the ocean of life, whose surface, scarcely stirred by the brief convulsion, returns to the level of its habitual flow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Ferragus
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
There are husbands, tall and of superior intellect, whose wives have lovers who are ugly, short, or stupid.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume, shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth), accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw death.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
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
No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from the hands of God than these two girls from their mother’s home when they went to the mayor’s office and the church to be married, after receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they were to go than the maternal convent.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Man himself is not a finished creation; if he were, God would not Be.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
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
Dost thou not see the nature of my love, a love without self-interest; a sentiment full of thee, thee only; a love which follows thee into the future to light that future for thee—for it is the one True Light. Canst thou now conceive with what ardor I would have thee leave this life which weighs thee down, and behold thee nearer than thou art to that world where Love is never-failing? Can it be aught but suffering to love for one life only? Hast thou not felt a thirst for the eternal love? Dost thou not feel the bliss to which a creature rises when, with twin-soul, it loves the Being who betrays not love, Him before whom we kneel in adoration?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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