French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Well, monsieur ... a musician always finds it difficult to reply when the answer needs the cooperation of a hundred skilled executants. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, without an orchestra would be of no great account.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colors employed in painting.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Here, the hearers receiving a musical impression do not work it out in themselves, as religion bids us work out the texts of Scripture in prayer. Hence it is very difficult to make them understand that there is in nature an eternal melody, exquisitely sweet, a perfect harmony, disturbed only by revolutions independent of the divine will, as passions are uncontrolled by the will of men.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
You, you sybarites, canting bigots, vagabonds, hypocrites, sneaks, cudgellers, bucks, pilgrims, and such like, who are disguised as masqueraders to cheat the world! .... to heel, hounds; get out of the way! Away, pudden-heads! What, are you still there, in the devil's name?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
If men of imagination and good sense, like you, desert one camp only to join the other; if they cannot keep to the happy medium between two forms of extravagance, we shall always be exposed to the satire of the sophists, who deny all progress, who compare the genius of man to this tablecloth, which, being too short to cover the whole of Signor Giardini's table, decks one end at the expense of the other.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
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
The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume, shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth), accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw death.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Eugénie Grandet
Often it is some girl in love, some gray-headed merchant on the verge of bankruptcy, some mother with a son’s wrong-doing to conceal, some starving artist, some great man whose influence is on the wane, and, for lack of money, is like to lose the fruit of all his labors—the power of their pleading has made me shudder. Sublime actors such as these play for me, for an audience of one, and they cannot deceive me. I can look into their inmost thoughts, and read them as God reads them. Nothing is hidden from me. Nothing is refused to the holder of the purse-strings to loose and to bind. I am rich enough to buy the consciences of those who control the action of ministers, from their office boys to their mistresses. Is not that power?—I can possess the fairest women, receive their softest caresses; is not that Pleasure? And is not your whole social economy summed up in terms of Power and Pleasure?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
If the role of an honest woman were nothing more than perilous ... I would admit that it would serve. But it is tiresome; and I have never met a virtuous woman who did not think about deceiving somebody.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
One thought borne inward, one prayer uplifted, one suffering endured, one echo of the Word within us, and our souls are forever changed.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides