HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XX

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once it is passed.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


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

Tags: boredom


There are, without counting grocers and drapers, so many people who, to kill time, occupy themselves in seeking for the hidden motives which direct women's actions, that it is a work of charity to classify by titles and in chapters all the private circumstances of marriage; a good index will enable them to put their finger on the motions of their wives' hearts, just as logarithmic tables give them the product of any two numbers.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: charity


We regard it as an infallible principle that great sweetness of disposition united in a woman with plainness that is not repulsive, form two indubitable elements of success in securing the greatest possible happiness to the home.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: happiness


"Women," she said, with tears in her eyes, "can only love; men act; they have a thousand ways in which they are bound to act. But we can only think, and pray, and worship."

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: Men


If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps will not last more than three nights.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


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

Tags: music


One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself.

HONORE DE BALZAC

La Comédie Humaine

Tags: manners


She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Magic Skin

Tags: marriage


There are those whose character is like a chestnut without a kernel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: character


A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


As the eye glances over a map of the coasts of Norway, can the imagination fail to marvel at their fantastic indentations and serrated edges, like a granite lace, against which the surges of the North Sea roar incessantly? Who has not dreamed of the majestic sights to be seen on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts the conformation of a fish’s spine, fishery being the staple commerce of the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain existence. Thanks to perils devoid of glory, to year-long snows which clothe the Norway peaks and guard them from profaning foot of traveler, these sublime beauties are virgin still; they will be seen to harmonize with human phenomena, also virgin—at least to poetry—which here took place, the history of which it is our purpose to relate.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: glory


For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Les Célibataires

Tags: passion


Further, we acknowledge that, to the credit of our age, we meet, ever since the revival of morality and religion and during our own times, some women, here and there, so moral, so religious, so devoted to their duties, so upright, so precise, so stiff, so virtuous, so--that the devil himself dare not even look at them; they are guarded on all sides by rosaries, hours of prayer and directors. Pshaw!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: age


I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so little success attended the first.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: God


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

Tags: love


So thorough an old maid as Sylvie was certain to make good progress in the way of salvation.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: progress


The final life, the fruition of all other lives, to which the powers of the soul have tended, and whose merits open the Sacred Portals to perfected man, is the life of Prayer.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: life