French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
There are those whose character is like a chestnut without a kernel.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps will not last more than three nights.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
I went to bed sorrowful, and I still suffer from the shock produced by this first collision of my frank, joyous nature with the harsh laws of society. Already the highway hedges are flecked with my white wool!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
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
The dark glee, the savage ferocity aroused by the possession of a few water-white pebbles, set me shuddering. I was dumb with amazement.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
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
The countess approached the divan in the centre of the room, where Raoul was perorating. She stood there with her arm in that of Madame Octave de Camp, an excellent woman, who kept the secret of the involuntary trembling by which these violent emotions betrayed themselves. Though the eyes of a captivated woman are apt to shed wonderful sweetness, Raoul was too occupied at that moment in letting off fireworks, too absorbed in his epigrams going up like rockets (in the midst of which were flaming portraits drawn in lines of fire) to notice the naïve admiration of one little Eve concealed in a group of women. Marie’s curiosity—like that which would undoubtedly precipitate all Paris into the Jardin des Plantes to see a unicorn, if such an animal could be found in those mountains of the moon, still virgin of the tread of Europeans—intoxicates a secondary mind as much as it saddens great ones; but Raoul was enchanted by it; although he was then too anxious to secure all women to care very much for one alone.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The countess had longed for emotions, and now she had them,—terrible, cruel, and yet most precious. She lived a deeper life in pain than in pleasure.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
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
Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue, his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live—well, this very man, who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties him to the wheel.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
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
Man himself is not a finished creation; if he were, God would not Be.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The study of thought’s mysteries, the discovery of those organs which belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem to have an independent power of bodily movement, so as to transport ourselves whither we will and to see without the aid of bodily organs,—in a word the laws of thought’s dynamic and those of its physical influence,—these things will fall to the lot of the next century, as their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps we, of the present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous blocks which later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of a glorious edifice.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Happiness in marriage results in perfect union of soul between a married pair. Hence it follows that in order to be happy a man must feel himself bound by certain rules of honor and delicacy. After having enjoyed the benefit of the social law which consecrates the natural craving, he must obey also the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves. If he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love sincerely: nothing can resist a genuine passion.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If poetry, music and painting have found infinite forms of expression, pleasure should be even more diversified. For in the three arts which aid us in seeking, often with little success, truth by means of analogy, the man stands alone with his imagination, while love is the union of two bodies and of two souls. If the three principal methods upon which we rely for the expression of thought require preliminary study in those whom nature has made poets, musicians or painters, is it not obvious that, in order, to be happy, it is necessary to be initiated into the secrets of pleasure? All men experience the craving for reproduction, as all feel hunger and thirst; but all are not called to be lovers and gastronomists. Our present civilization has proved that taste is a science, and it is only certain privileged beings who have learned how to eat and drink. Pleasure considered as an art is still waiting for its physiologists. As for ourselves, we are contented with pointing out that ignorance of the principles upon which happiness is founded, is the sole cause of that misfortune which is the lot of all the predestined.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A husband ought never to be the first to go to sleep and the last to awaken.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage