HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

In the matter of repartees literary celebrities are often not as quick as women.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: women


Correspondence, in which the pen is always bolder than speech, and thought, wreathing itself with flowers, allows itself to be seen without disguise.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: flowers


A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.

HONORE DE BALZAC

A Woman of Thirty

Tags: women


What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Ferragus

Tags: fantasy


Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: gold


True, I have my weak points; but were I a man, I should adore them. They arise from what is most promising in me.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides


Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: genius


There are husbands, tall and of superior intellect, whose wives have lovers who are ugly, short, or stupid.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: lovers


The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fool


Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


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


Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: prayer


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


To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: law


Thoughts of adultery do not take possession of the heart of a married woman all at once, like a shot from a pistol.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: adultery


Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: tyranny


She is dying, like a flower wilted by the burning sun.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: sun


Man himself is not a finished creation; if he were, God would not Be.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


We find in the unexplorable nature of the Spiritual World certain beings armed with these wondrous faculties, comparable only to the terrible power of certain gases in the physical world, beings who combine with other beings, penetrate them as active agents, and produce upon them witchcrafts, charms, against which these helpless slaves are wholly defenseless; they are, in fact, enchanted, brought under subjection, reduced to a condition of dreadful vassalage. Such mysterious beings overpower others with the scepter and the glory of a superior nature,—acting upon them at times like the torpedo which electrifies or paralyzes the fisherman, at other times like a dose of phosphorous which stimulates life and accelerates its propulsion; or again, like opium, which puts to sleep corporeal nature, disengages the spirit from every bond, enables it to float above the world and shows this earth to the spiritual eye as through a prism, extracting from it the food most needed.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages—youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: Paris