French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
HONORE DE BALZAC
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Honore de Balzac
O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler against which all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be possible that lovers have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or raised thee to the skies? O magic headache, O delusive headache, blest be the brain that first invented thee! Shame on the doctor who shall find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the only ill that women bless, doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou dispensest to them, O deceitful headache!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
Everyday life cannot be cast in heroic mould. No doubt there seems, at any rate at first sight, no room left in this scheme of life for that longing after the infinite which expands the mind and soul. But what is there to prevent me from launching on that boundless sea our familiar craft?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Your wife ought to drink water, lightly tinged with a Burgundy wine agreeable to her taste, but destitute of any tonic properties; every other kind of wine would be bad for her. Never allow her to drink water alone; if you do, you are lost...
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Wit is thought to be a quality rare in comedians. It is so natural to suppose that persons who spend their lives in showing things on the outside have nothing within.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Lily of the Valley
What woman wants pity?... A man's sternness is to us our only pardon.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
To beat a retreat with the honors of war has always been the triumph of the ablest generals.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
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
The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or an imbecile.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Perhaps the mind cannot be complete at all points; perhaps artists of every kind live too much in the present moment to study the future; perhaps they are too observant of the ridiculous to notice snares, or they may believe that none would dare to lay a snare for such as they.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Now it is impossible for a woman who is perpetually at war with herself and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others in peace or refrain from envying their happiness.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Man is the minister of Nature, and society engrafts itself upon her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by a startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case so manifold.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human feelings, which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the weapons of which they are victims. They have the instinct of love, because it is their whole life, and of jealousy, because it is almost the only means by which they can control us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage