HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XVIII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

The artisan, the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue, his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live—well, this very man, who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties him to the wheel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: strength


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

Tags: conscience


An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Le catechisme social

Tags: atheism


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

Tags: misfortune


I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832

Tags: writing


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

Tags: love


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


A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: life


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


Silliness has two ways of comporting itself; it talks, or is silent. Silent silliness can be borne.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette


In the terrific tumult of raving passions, the holy Voice would have been unheard.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara


When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: soul


Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and unnamed things compose—in order to fit the problem of Creation to the measure of your logic—a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite, God would still not be its master.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: universe


Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: language


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: France


Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: life


The dark glee, the savage ferocity aroused by the possession of a few water-white pebbles, set me shuddering. I was dumb with amazement.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck