French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Everywhere you find the man of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who torments himself; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The winters are to fashionable women what a campaign once was to the soldiers of the Empire.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
La Fausse Maîtresse
In love, putting aside all consideration of the soul, the heart of a woman is like a lyre which does not reveal its secret, excepting to him who is a skillful player.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others--existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
There are no two dramas alike: there are hideous sores, deadly chagrins, love scenes, misery that soon will lie under the ripples of the Seine, young men’s joys that lead to the scaffold, the laughter of despair, and sumptuous banquets. Yesterday it was a tragedy. A worthy soul of a father drowned himself because he could not support his family. To-morrow is a comedy.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The colonel and the lawyer, delighted to lay hands on a fool whose money would be useful to their schemes, and who might himself, in certain cases, be made to bell the cat, while his house would serve as a meeting-ground for the scattered elements of the party, made the most of the Rogrons’ ill-will against the upper classes of the place. The three had already a slight tie in their united subscription to the "Constitutionnel"; it would certainly not be difficult for the colonel to make a Liberal of the ex-mercer, though Rogron knew so little of politics that he was capable of regarding the exploits of Sergeant Mercier as those of a brother shopkeeper.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette