HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XI

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

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


Man is the minister of Nature, and society engrafts itself upon her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: nature


A long future requires a long past.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: future


What an admirable maneuver it would be to make a wife dance, and to feed her on vegetables!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: dance


Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: joy


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


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

Tags: power


A man may be put to death by a thought.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: death


Two persons are married. The myrmidons of the Minotaur, young and old, have usually the politeness to leave the bride and bridegroom entirely to themselves at first. They look upon the husband as an artisan, whose business it is to trim, polish, cut into facets and mount the diamond, which is to pass from hand to hand in order to be admired all around. Moreover, the aspect of a young married couple much taken with each other always rejoices the heart of those among the celibates who are known as roues; they take good care not to disturb the excitement by which society is to be profited; they also know that heavy showers to not last long. They therefore keep quiet; they watch, and wait, with incredible vigilance, for the moment when bride and groom begin to weary of the seventh heaven.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: business


Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: wealth


Great artists are beings who, to quote Napoleon, can cut off at will the connection which Nature has put between the senses and thought.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: artists


Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or an imbecile.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Your young wife will never take a lover, as we have elsewhere said, without making serious reflections. As soon as the honeymoon wanes, you will find that you have aroused in her a sentiment of pleasure which you have not satisfied; you have opened to her the book of life; and she has derived an excellent idea from the prosaic dullness which distinguishes your complacent love, of the poetry which is the natural result when souls and pleasures are in accord. Like a timid bird, just startled by the report of a gun which has ceased, she puts her head out of her nest, looks round her, and sees the world; and knowing the word of a charade which you have played, she feels instinctively the void which exists in your languishing passion. She divines that it is only with a lover that she can regain the delightful exercise of her free will in love. You have dried the green wood in preparation for a fire.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: principles


In these times, liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: liberty


So, with the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider’s web.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: experience


The passing joys of earthly love are gleams which reveal to certain souls the coming of joys more durable; just as the discovery of a single law of nature leads certain privileged beings to a conception of the system of the universe.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: discovery


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: conversation