French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
When a young woman suddenly takes up religious practices which she has before abandoned, this new order of life always conceals a motive highly significant, in view of her husband’s happiness. In the case of at least seventy-nine women out of a hundred this return to God proves that they have been inconsistent, or that they intend to become so.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
All the epigrams written against the little sex—for it is antiquated nowadays to say the fair sex—ought to be disarmed of their point and changed into madrigals of eulogy! All men ought to consider that the sole virtue of a woman is to love and that all women are prodigiously virtuous, and at that point to close the book and end their meditation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The bed is the whole of marriage.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
When there is an old maid in a house, watch-dogs are unnecessary; not the slightest event can occur that she does not see and comment upon and pursue to its utmost consequences.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
I don’t say they love, my dear, but they are forced to lodge somewhere, like other men, and when they haven’t a home of their own they lodge with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
The sweetest of all consolations to suffering souls, to martyrs, to artists, in the worst of that divine agony which hatred and envy force upon them, is to meet with praise where they have hitherto found censure and injustice.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him; he would not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the comfortless look of the room.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The more one judges, the less one loves.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance, owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
An honest woman ought to be in a financial condition such as forbids her lover to think she will ever cost him anything.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage