HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XI

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders--Matter and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: universe


For want of exercising in nature’s own way the activity bestowed upon women, and yet impelled to spend it in some way or other, Mademoiselle Gamard had acquired the habit of using it in petty intrigues, provincial cabals, and those self-seeking schemes which occupy, sooner or later, the lives of all old maids.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: habit


Two persons are married. The myrmidons of the Minotaur, young and old, have usually the politeness to leave the bride and bridegroom entirely to themselves at first. They look upon the husband as an artisan, whose business it is to trim, polish, cut into facets and mount the diamond, which is to pass from hand to hand in order to be admired all around. Moreover, the aspect of a young married couple much taken with each other always rejoices the heart of those among the celibates who are known as roues; they take good care not to disturb the excitement by which society is to be profited; they also know that heavy showers to not last long. They therefore keep quiet; they watch, and wait, with incredible vigilance, for the moment when bride and groom begin to weary of the seventh heaven.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: business


Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

HONORé DE BALZAC

attributed, And I Quote

Tags: marriage


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

Tags: family


She looked about her like a nightingale descending from a leafy covert to drink at a spring, to see if she were alone in the solitude, if the silence hid no witness; then she raised her head to Raoul, who bent his own, and let him take one kiss, the first and the only one that she ever gave in secret, feeling happier at that moment than she had felt in five years. Raoul thought all his toils well-paid. They both walked forward they scarcely knew where, but it was on the road to Auteuil; presently, however, they were forced to return and find their carriages, pacing together with the rhythmic step well-known to lovers. Raoul had faith in that kiss given with the quiet facility of a sacred sentiment. All the evil of it was in the mind of the world, not in that of the woman who walked beside him. Marie herself, given over to the grateful admiration which characterizes the love of woman, walked with a firm, light step on the graveled path, saying, like Raoul, but few words; yet those few were felt and full of meaning. The sky was cloudless, the tall trees had burgeoned, a few green shoots were already brightening their myriad of brown twigs. The shrubs, the birches, the willows, the poplars were showing their first diaphanous and tender foliage. No soul resists these harmonies. Love explained Nature as it had already explained society to Marie’s heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: kiss


All the affected airs of sensibility which a woman puts on invariably deceive a lover; and on occasions when a husband shrugs his shoulders, a lover is in ecstasies.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Well, gold contains all things in embryo; gold realizes all things for us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: gold


The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: soul


Yesterday, at the Italian Opera, I could feel some one was looking at me; my eyes were drawn, as by a magnet, to two wells of fire, gleaming like carbuncles in a dim corner of the orchestra. Henarez never moved his eyes from me. The wretch had discovered the one spot from which he could see me—and there he was. I don't know what he may be as a politician, but for love he has a genius.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: genius


Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: virtue


Even thrones rise and fall in France with fearful rapidity. Fifteen years have wreaked their will on a great empire, a monarchy, and a revolution. No one can now dare to count upon the future.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: France


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

Tags: artists


The words fell as the axe of a skillful woodman falls at the root of a young tree and brings it down at a single blow.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: tree


Woman understands all things through love; what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees; when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: grace


O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler against which all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be possible that lovers have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or raised thee to the skies? O magic headache, O delusive headache, blest be the brain that first invented thee! Shame on the doctor who shall find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the only ill that women bless, doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou dispensest to them, O deceitful headache!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: art


So, with the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider’s web.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: experience


To sum up, the world is mine without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest hold on me.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: effort