French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832
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
In the matter of repartees literary celebrities are often not as quick as women.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Let the man whom I deign to love beware how he thinks of anything but loving me!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Paris is the crown of the world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization; it is a great man, a perpetually creative artist, a politician with second-sight who must of necessity have wrinkles on his forehead, the vices of a great man, the fantasies of the artist, and the politician’s disillusions. Its physiognomy suggests the evolution of good and evil, battle and victory; the moral combat of ‘89, the clarion calls of which still re-echo in every corner of the world; and also the downfall of 1814. Thus this city can no more be moral, or cordial, or clean, than the engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire when they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality sometimes allows. The City of Paris has her great mast, all of bronze, carved with victories, and for watchman—Napoleon. The barque may roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with full sail, cries from the height of her tops, with the voice of her scientists and artists: "Onward, advance! Follow me!" She carries a huge crew, which delights in adorning her with fresh streamers. Boys and urchins laughing in the rigging; ballast of heavy bourgeoisie; working-men and sailor-men touched with tar; in her cabins the lucky passengers; elegant midshipmen smoke their cigars leaning over the bulwarks; then, on the deck, her soldiers, innovators or ambitious, would accost every fresh shore, and shooting out their bright lights upon it, ask for glory which is pleasure, or for love which needs gold.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives its epistolary provender from all hands.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
We cannot measure the vast orbit of the Divine thought of which we are but an atom as small as God is great; but we can feel its vastness, we can kneel, adore, and wait.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
When she plays, an actress can live no life of her own; she can neither dress, nor eat, nor talk.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Woman understands all things through love; what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees; when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
A woman's life begins with her first passion.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
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
She is dying, like a flower wilted by the burning sun.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
When two human beings are united by pleasure, all social conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes, excepting at the due season.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
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