HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XX

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

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

Tags: wine


One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself.

HONORE DE BALZAC

La Comédie Humaine

Tags: manners


Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


"Women," she said, with tears in her eyes, "can only love; men act; they have a thousand ways in which they are bound to act. But we can only think, and pray, and worship."

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: Men


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


Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and unnamed things compose—in order to fit the problem of Creation to the measure of your logic—a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite, God would still not be its master.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: universe


Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


When a woman utters the name of a man but twice a day, there is perhaps some uncertainty about her feelings toward him—but if thrice?—Oh! oh!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Further, we acknowledge that, to the credit of our age, we meet, ever since the revival of morality and religion and during our own times, some women, here and there, so moral, so religious, so devoted to their duties, so upright, so precise, so stiff, so virtuous, so--that the devil himself dare not even look at them; they are guarded on all sides by rosaries, hours of prayer and directors. Pshaw!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: age


There are those whose character is like a chestnut without a kernel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: character


An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Les Célibataires

Tags: passion


She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Magic Skin

Tags: marriage


Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence, and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: love


So thorough an old maid as Sylvie was certain to make good progress in the way of salvation.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: progress


Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colors employed in painting.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: light


We regard it as an infallible principle that great sweetness of disposition united in a woman with plainness that is not repulsive, form two indubitable elements of success in securing the greatest possible happiness to the home.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: happiness


Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They are silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see nothing.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: family


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

Tags: childhood


A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage