HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter.php on line 25

The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter.php on line 35

Physiology of Marriage


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/b/includes/quoter.php on line 61

Tags: fate


The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives its epistolary provender from all hands.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


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

Tags: happiness


For want of exercising in nature’s own way the activity bestowed upon women, and yet impelled to spend it in some way or other, Mademoiselle Gamard had acquired the habit of using it in petty intrigues, provincial cabals, and those self-seeking schemes which occupy, sooner or later, the lives of all old maids.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: habit


A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: life


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


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

Tags: tree


A husband will be best avenged by his wife's lover.

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

Tags: life


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

Tags: faults


Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: gold


When two human beings are united by pleasure, all social conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes, excepting at the due season.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832

Tags: writing


A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides


No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from the hands of God than these two girls from their mother’s home when they went to the mayor’s office and the church to be married, after receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they were to go than the maternal convent.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: church


Here, the hearers receiving a musical impression do not work it out in themselves, as religion bids us work out the texts of Scripture in prayer. Hence it is very difficult to make them understand that there is in nature an eternal melody, exquisitely sweet, a perfect harmony, disturbed only by revolutions independent of the divine will, as passions are uncontrolled by the will of men.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: work


If men of imagination and good sense, like you, desert one camp only to join the other; if they cannot keep to the happy medium between two forms of extravagance, we shall always be exposed to the satire of the sophists, who deny all progress, who compare the genius of man to this tablecloth, which, being too short to cover the whole of Signor Giardini's table, decks one end at the expense of the other.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: desert


She is dying, like a flower wilted by the burning sun.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: sun


Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


If a man strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he strike his wife it is suicide!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: suicide