HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES VII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

The lawyer, tall and thin, had liberal opinions in place of talent.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: lawyer


Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: marriage


A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Honorine


You are a woman, and you can certainly win a priest to your interests.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours


We are the noblest of God’s greatest works. Has He not given us the faculty of reflecting on Nature; of gathering it within us by thought; of making it a footstool and stepping-stone from and by which to rise to Him? We love according to the greater or the lesser portion of heaven our souls contain. But do not be unjust, Minna; behold the magnificence spread before you. Ocean expands at your feet like a carpet; the mountains resemble amphitheaters; heaven’s ether is above them like the arching folds of a stage curtain. Here we may breathe the thoughts of God, as it were like a perfume. See! the angry billows which engulf the ships laden with men seem to us, where we are, mere bubbles; and if we raise our eyes and look above, all there is blue. Behold that diadem of stars! Here the tints of earthly impressions disappear; standing on this nature rarefied by space do you not feel within you something deeper far than mind, grander than enthusiasm, of greater energy than will? Are you not conscious of emotions whose interpretation is no longer in us? Do you not feel your pinions? Let us pray.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


The interest of a husband as much as his honor forbids him to indulge a pleasure which he has not had the skill to make his wife desire.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: desire


When a man belongs to the small class of those who by a liberal education have been made masters of the domain of thought, he ought always, before marrying, to examine his physical and moral resources. To contend advantageously with the tempest which so many attractions tend to raise in the heart of his wife, a husband ought to possess, besides the science of pleasure and a fortune which saves him from sinking into any class of the predestined, robust health, exquisite tact, considerable intellect, too much good sense to make his superiority felt, excepting on fit occasions, and finally great acuteness of hearing and sight.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: education


Thwarted passion and mortified vanity are great babblers.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: passion


The number of things which you do not understand increases day by day.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Speed thy way through the luminous spheres; behold, admire, hasten! Flying thus thou canst pause or advance without weariness. Like other men, thou wouldst fain be plunged forever in these spheres of light and perfume where now thou art, free of thy swooning body, and where thy thought alone has utterance. Fly! enjoy for a fleeting moment the wings thou shalt surely win when Love has grown so perfect in thee that thou hast no senses left; when thy whole being is all mind, all love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


Some fine spring morning, the day after a ball, or the eve of a country party, this situation reaches its last phase; your wife is listless and the happiness within her reach has no more attractions for her. Her mind, her imagination, perhaps her natural caprices call for a lover. Nevertheless, she dare not yet embark upon an intrigue whose consequences and details fill her with dread. You are still there for some purpose or other; you are a weight in the balance, although a very light one. On the other hand, the lover presents himself arrayed in all the graces of novelty and all the charms of mystery. The conflict which has arisen in the heart of your wife becomes, in presence of the enemy, more real and more full of peril than before. Very soon the more dangers and risks there are to be run, the more she burns to plunge into that delicious gulf of fear, enjoyment, anguish and delight. Her imagination kindles and sparkles, her future life rises before her eyes, colored with romantic and mysterious hues. Her soul discovers that existence has already taken its tone from this struggle which to a woman has so much solemnity in it. All is agitation, all is fire, all is commotion within her. She lives with three times as much intensity as before, and judges the future by the present. The little pleasure which you have lavished upon her bears witness against you; for she is not excited as much by the pleasures which she has received, as by those which she is yet to enjoy; does not imagination show her that her happiness will be keener with this lover, whom the laws deny her, than with you? And then, she finds enjoyment even in her terror and terror in her enjoyment. Then she falls in love with this imminent danger, this sword of Damocles hung over her head by you yourself, thus preferring the delirious agonies of such a passion, to that conjugal inanity which is worse to her than death, to that indifference which is less a sentiment than the absence of all sentiment.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: imagination


If the man has genius ... he certainly has neither the constancy nor the patience which sanctifies it, and makes it a thing divine. He endeavors to impose on the world by placing himself on a level which he does nothing to maintain. True talent, pains-taking and honorable talent does not act thus. Men who possess such talent follow their path courageously; they accept its pains and penalties, and don’t cover them with tinsel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: talent


All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Louis Lambert

Tags: poetry


A man must not flatter himself that he knows his wife, and is making her happy unless he sees her often at his knees.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


The exercise of thought, whatever people may say, is more noble than the exercise of bodily organs, and we give precedence to science over cookery and to intellectual training over hygiene.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: exercise


God would have been strangely unjust had he confined the testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied them to others. The brazen rod belongs to all.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: power


For my part, I like those long trials of the old-fashioned chivalry. That lout of a young lord, who took offence because his sovereign-lady sent him down among the lions to fetch her glove, was, in my opinion, very impertinent, and a fool too. Doubtless the lady had in reserve for him some exquisite flower of love, which he lost, as he well deserved—the puppy!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: fool


For a whole fortnight now, my dear, I have been living the life of society; one evening at the Italiens, another at the Grand Opera, and always a ball afterwards. Ah! society is a witching world.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: life


When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Muse of the Department

Tags: women