French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
The tact with which celibates discover the moment when the breeze begins to rise in a new home can only be compared to the indifference of those husbands for whom the Red-moon rises. There is, even in intrigue, a moment of ripeness which must be waited for. The great man is he who anticipates the outcome of certain circumstances. Men of fifty-two, whom we have represented as being so dangerous, know very well, for example, that any man who offers himself as lover to a woman and is haughtily rejected, will be received with open arms three months afterwards. But it may be truly said that in general married people in betraying their indifference towards each other show the same naiveté with which they first betrayed their love. At the time when you are traversing with madame the ravishing fields of the seventh heaven—where according to their temperament, newly married people remain encamped for a longer or shorter time, as the preceding Meditation has proved—you go little or not at all into society. Happy as you are in your home, if you do go abroad, it will be for the purpose of making up a choice party and visiting the theatre, the country, etc. From the moment you the newly wedded make your appearance in the world again, you and your bride together, or separately, and are seen to be attentive to each other at balls, at parties, at all the empty amusements created to escape the void of an unsatisfied heart, the celibates discern that your wife comes there in search of distraction; her home, her husband are therefore wearisome to her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Life -- is it anything more than a machine to which money imparts the motion?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Narrow natures expand by persecuting as much as others through beneficence; they prove their power over their fellows by cruel tyranny as others do by loving kindness; they simply go the way their temperaments drive them. Add to this the propulsion of self-interest and you may read the enigma of most social matters.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
The woman being shrewd, intelligent, sarcastic and having leisure to meditate over an ironical phrase, can easily turn you into ridicule during a momentary clash of opinions. The day on which she turns you into ridicule, sees the end of your happiness. Your power has expired. A woman who has laughed at her husband cannot henceforth love him. A man should be, to the woman who is in love with him, a being full of power, of greatness, and always imposing. A family cannot exist without despotism. Think of that, ye nations!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
When women are secretly to blame they often show ostensibly the utmost womanly pride. It is a dissimulation of mind for which we ought to be obliged to them. The deception is full of dignity, if not of grandeur.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Now a young bachelor of seventeen is apt to make deep cuts with his penknife in the parchment of contracts, as the chronicles of scandal will tell you.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
All that has to do with matters of material existence I leave to my wife.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Let us leave hearts out of the question. Business is business, and business is not carried on with sentimentality like romances.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Discretion is the best form of calculation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Mankind are not perfect, but one age is more or less hypocritical than another, and then simpletons say that its morality is high or low.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
The King stands for us all. To die for the King is to die for oneself, for one's family, which, like the kingdom, cannot die.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
To be jealous is to exhibit, at once, the height of egotism, the error of amour-propre, the vexation of morbid vanity. Women rather encourage this ridiculous feeling, because by means of it they can obtain cashmere shawls, silver toilet sets, diamonds, which for them mark the high thermometer mark of their power. Moreover, unless you appear blinded by jealousy, your wife will not keep on her guard; for there is no pitfall which she does not distrust, excepting that which she makes for herself.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Marriage is better known than Barabbas; all the ideas which it calls up have been circulated in our books since the world began, and there is no useful opinion, no absurd scheme, but it finds an author, a printer, a library, and a reader.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The Countess sat playing with her children. When she heard my name, she sprang up and came to meet me, then she sat down and pointed without a word to a chair by the fire. Her face wore the inscrutable mask beneath which women of the world conceal their most vehement emotions. Trouble had withered that face already. Nothing of its beauty now remained, save the marvelous outlines in which its principal charm had lain.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The woman who is happy in her affections does not go much into the world.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Everywhere you find the man of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who torments himself; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
What sentiment of admiration must rise in the soul of a philosopher on discovering that there is, perhaps, but one single principle in the world, as there is but one God; and that our ideas and our affections are subject to the same laws which cause the sun to rise, the flowers to bloom, the universe to teem with life!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage