HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from the hands of God than these two girls from their mother’s home when they went to the mayor’s office and the church to be married, after receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they were to go than the maternal convent.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: church


However portentous a fact may be, or even supernatural--if such facts exist--however solemnly a miracle may be done in sight of all, the lightning of that fact, the thunderbolt of that miracle is quickly swallowed up in the ocean of life, whose surface, scarcely stirred by the brief convulsion, returns to the level of its habitual flow.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: miracle


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


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


The men of science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them strikes their attention. Their unhappiness is consummated; in full light of noon they scarcely even perceive it. Oh happy men! a thousand times happy! Example: Beauzee, returning home after session at the Academy, surprises his wife with a German. "Did not I tell you, madame, that it was necessary that I shall go," cried the stranger. "My dear sir," interrupted the academician, "you ought to say that I should go!"

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: Men


Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are more numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than the caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences of our own life have revealed to us on the subject of love, arms us celibates with a terrible power: we are the lion of the Gospel seeking whom we may devour.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


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


Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

HONORE DE BALZAC

attributed, Words of Wisdom: Honore de Balzac

Tags: solitude


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


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

HONORE DE BALZAC

Ferragus

Tags: fantasy


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


Let the man whom I deign to love beware how he thinks of anything but loving me!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: love


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


Silliness has two ways of comporting itself; it talks, or is silent. Silent silliness can be borne.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette


Women will not suffer their idol to step down from his pedestal. They do not forgive the slightest pettiness in a god.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: God


In one of the finest houses of the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, at half-past eleven at night, two young women were sitting before the fireplace of a boudoir hung with blue velvet of that tender shade, with shimmering reflections, which French industry has lately learned to fabricate. Over the doors and windows were draped soft folds of blue cashmere, the tint of the hangings, the work of one of those upholsterers who have just missed being artists. A silver lamp studded with turquoise, and suspended by chains of beautiful workmanship, hung from the centre of the ceiling. The same system of decoration was followed in the smallest details, and even to the ceiling of fluted blue silk, with long bands of white cashmere falling at equal distances on the hangings, where they were caught back by ropes of pearl. A warm Belgian carpet, thick as turf, of a gray ground with blue posies, covered the floor. The furniture, of carved ebony, after a fine model of the old school, gave substance and richness to the rather too decorative quality, as a painter might call it, of the rest of the room. On either side of a large window, two etageres displayed a hundred precious trifles, flowers of mechanical art brought into bloom by the fire of thought. On a chimney-piece of slate-blue marble were figures in old Dresden, shepherds in bridal garb, with delicate bouquets in their hands, German fantasticalities surrounding a platinum clock, inlaid with arabesques. Above it sparkled the brilliant facets of a Venice mirror framed in ebony, with figures carved in relief, evidently obtained from some former royal residence. Two jardinieres were filled with the exotic product of a hot-house, pale, but divine flowers, the treasures of botany.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: flowers


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: sun


I longed for a companion to the kingdom of Light; I wished to show you that morsel of mud, I find you bound to it.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita