French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
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
Singular creature, he had never cared to find out a single relative among four generations counted on the female side. The thought of his heirs was abhorrent to him; and the idea that his wealth could pass into other hands after his death simply inconceivable.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
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
Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth. These discordant combinations, far from moving the listener, arouse in him a feeling analogous to that which he would experience on seeing a rope-dancer hanging to a thread and swaying between life and death. Never does a soothing strain come in to mitigate the fatiguing suspense. It really is as though the composer had had no other object in view than to produce a baroque effect without troubling himself about musical truth or unity, or about the capabilities of human voices which are swamped by this flood of instrumental noise.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Music is at once a science and an art. It is rooted in physics and mathematics, hence it is a science; inspiration makes it an art, unconsciously utilizing the theorems of science. It is founded in physics by the very nature of the matter it works on. Sound is air in motion. The air is formed of constituents which, in us, no doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to them, sympathize, and magnify them by the power of the mind.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
The number of things which you do not understand increases day by day.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
These words struck the vicar a blow, which he felt the more because his late reverie had made him completely happy.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is another old woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
What husband will be able to sleep peacefully beside his young and beautiful wife while he knows that three celibates, at least, are on the watch; that if they have not already encroached upon his little property, they regard the bride as their destined prey, for sooner or later she will fall into their hands, either by stratagem, compulsive conquest or free choice?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
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
But you must not give the name of virtuous woman to her who, in her struggle against an involuntary passion, has yielded nothing to her lover whom she idolizes. She does injury in the most cruel way in which it can possibly be done to a loving husband. For what remains to him of his wife? A thing without name, a living corpse. In the very midst of delight his wife remains like the guest who has been warned by Borgia that certain meats were poisoned; he felt no hunger, he ate sparingly or pretended to eat. He longed for the meat which he had abandoned for that provided by the terrible cardinal, and sighed for the moment when the feast was over and he could leave the table.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
God may seem to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in all things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Perhaps it is necessary to have been, like Nebuchadnezzar, something of a wild beast, and shut up in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes without other prey than the butcher’s meat doled out by the keeper, or a retired merchant deprived of the joys of tormenting his clerks, to understand the impatience with which the brother and sister awaited the arrival of their cousin Lorrain.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
The whole woman nature stands before you; all look at her, but none can interpret her thoughts. But for you, the eye is more or less dimmed, wide-opened or closed; the lid twitches, the eyebrow moves; a wrinkle, which vanishes as quickly as a ripple on the ocean, furrows her brow for one moment; the lip tightens, it is slightly curved or it is wreathed with animation—for you the woman has spoken.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
We must laugh no more at the government, my friends, since it has found the means of raising fifteen hundred millions in taxes. Clergymen, bishops, monks, and nuns are not yet rich enough to allow of their drinking at home among themselves; but only let St. Michael, who drove the Devil out of heaven, appear, and we shall perhaps see the good old times come back again!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage