French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence, and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Eugénie Grandet
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
attributed, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources
The eyes of the good vicar never reached the optical range which enables men of the world to see and evade their neighbors' rough points. Before he could be brought to perceive the faults of his landlady he was forced to undergo the warning which Nature gives to all her creatures--pain.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each other more and more.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The higher thy flight the less canst thou see the abysses. There are none in heaven.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Yes, Prayer--the aspiration of the soul freed absolutely from the body--bears all forces within it, and applies them to the constant and perseverant union of the Visible and the Invisible. When you possess the faculty of praying without weariness, with love, with force, with certainty, with intelligence, your spiritualized nature will presently be invested with power. Like a rushing wind, like a thunderbolt, it cuts its way through all things and shares the power of God.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Who would not at the present moment wish to retain the persuasion that wives are virtuous? Are they not the supreme flower of the country? Are they not all blooming creatures, fascinating the world by their beauty, their youth, their life and their love? To believe in their virtue is a sort of social religion, for they are the ornament of the world, and form the chief glory of France.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
There are husbands, tall and of superior intellect, whose wives have lovers who are ugly, short, or stupid.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of one woman only!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A husband ought never to be the first to go to sleep and the last to awaken.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and mingling with this reliance the convenient maxims of the fashionable world, she takes as her guide while under the control of those desires which everything conspires to excite, her own deluding fancies, which prove a guide all the more treacherous, because a young girl rarely ever confides to another the secret thoughts of her first love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
He who is to win my heart, my dear, must be harsh and unbending with men, but gentle with women. His eagle eye must have power to quell with a single glance the least approach to ridicule. He will have a pitying smile for those who would jeer at sacred things, above all, at that poetry of the heart, without which life would be but a dreary commonplace. I have the greatest scorn for those who would rob us of the living fountain of religious beliefs, so rich in solace. His faith, therefore, should have the simplicity of a child, though united to the firm conviction of an intelligent man, who has examined the foundations of his creed. His fresh and original way of looking at things must be entirely free from affectation or desire to show off. His words will be few and fit, and his mind so richly stored, that he cannot possibly become a bore to himself any more than to others.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and so suggesting an image. The instruments in music perform this part, as color does in painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same, according to the pitch,—quite regular when the combination is a true chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,—I say that music is an art conceived in the very bowels of nature.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara