HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

To seize adroitly upon the varieties of pleasure, to develop them, to impart to them a new style, an original expression, constitutes the genius of a husband.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: genius


A long future requires a long past.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: future


Though all things in society as well as in the universe are said to have a purpose, there do exist here below certain beings whose purpose and utility seem inexplicable.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: purpose


In Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is a desire, and hatred a whim; there’s no true kinsman but the thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: desire


Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


In the provinces there is always a valve or a faucet through which gossip leaks from one social set to another.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: gossip


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


For want of exercising in nature’s own way the activity bestowed upon women, and yet impelled to spend it in some way or other, Mademoiselle Gamard had acquired the habit of using it in petty intrigues, provincial cabals, and those self-seeking schemes which occupy, sooner or later, the lives of all old maids.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: habit


Now it is impossible for a woman who is perpetually at war with herself and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others in peace or refrain from envying their happiness.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: happiness


Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps, will some day find its Dante.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: Hell


The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fate


The words fell as the axe of a skillful woodman falls at the root of a young tree and brings it down at a single blow.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: tree


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

Tags: cooperation


Make another failure like that ... and you'll be immortal.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: failure


I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832

Tags: writing


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 strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he strike his wife it is suicide!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: suicide


It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by a startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case so manifold.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


A husband will be best avenged by his wife's lover.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


A woman's thought is endowed with incredible elasticity. When she receives a knockdown blow, she bends, seems crushed, and then renews her natural shape in a given time.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: thought