HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES IV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: art


In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


All the epigrams written against the little sex—for it is antiquated nowadays to say the fair sex—ought to be disarmed of their point and changed into madrigals of eulogy! All men ought to consider that the sole virtue of a woman is to love and that all women are prodigiously virtuous, and at that point to close the book and end their meditation.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


What a scene it was that met our eyes! The room was in frightful disorder; clothes and papers and rags lay tossed about in a confusion horrible to see in the presence of Death; and there, in the midst, stood the Countess in disheveled despair, unable to utter a word, her eyes glittering. The Count had scarcely breathed his last before his wife came in and forced open the drawers and the desk; the carpet was strewn with litter, some of the furniture and boxes were broken, the signs of violence could be seen everywhere. But if her search had at first proved fruitless, there was that in her excitement and attitude which led me to believe that she had found the mysterious documents at last. I glanced at the bed, and professional instinct told me all that had happened. The mattress had been flung contemptuously down by the bedside, and across it, face downwards, lay the body of the Count, like one of the paper envelopes that strewed the carpet—he too was nothing now but an envelope. There was something grotesquely horrible in the attitude of the stiffening rigid limbs.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: attitude


I don’t say they love, my dear, but they are forced to lodge somewhere, like other men, and when they haven’t a home of their own they lodge with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: home


Fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: pleasure


The sweetest of all consolations to suffering souls, to martyrs, to artists, in the worst of that divine agony which hatred and envy force upon them, is to meet with praise where they have hitherto found censure and injustice.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: artists


Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: pleasure


But in the glance at once tender and wild, swift and deep, which that woman’s black eyes had shot at him by stealth, there was such a world of buried sorrows and promised joys!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara


At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: conscience


We must all agree that legality would be a fine thing for social scoundrelism IF THERE WERE NO GOD.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: God


The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter. Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: nature


It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: marriage


In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance, owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: evil


For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him; he would not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the comfortless look of the room.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: apathy


Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: children


But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: art


A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: business


When there is an old maid in a house, watch-dogs are unnecessary; not the slightest event can occur that she does not see and comment upon and pursue to its utmost consequences.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: dogs