French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
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
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The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay imitated nature.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain them.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
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
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
The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders--Matter and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite.
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
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Eugénie Grandet
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
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
Passions are as mean as they are cruel.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The eyes of the good vicar never reached the optical range which enables men of the world to see and evade their neighbors' rough points. Before he could be brought to perceive the faults of his landlady he was forced to undergo the warning which Nature gives to all her creatures--pain.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
How mad a man must appear when desire renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If the role of an honest woman were nothing more than perilous ... I would admit that it would serve. But it is tiresome; and I have never met a virtuous woman who did not think about deceiving somebody.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Men, born doubtless to be beautiful—for all creatures have a relative beauty—are enrolled from their childhood beneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel, the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes