HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XXII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

The music of the Opera enchants me; and whilst my soul is plunged in divine pleasure, I am the centre of admiration and the focus of all the opera-glasses. But a single glance will make the boldest youth drop his eyes.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: opera


Men are like that, they can resist sound argument, yet yield to a glance.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

"Le Contrat de mariage", Scènes de la vie privée

Tags: men


It is very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and mingling with this reliance the convenient maxims of the fashionable world, she takes as her guide while under the control of those desires which everything conspires to excite, her own deluding fancies, which prove a guide all the more treacherous, because a young girl rarely ever confides to another the secret thoughts of her first love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: the present


It is extremely rare for young men, when driven to suicide, to attempt it a second time if the first fails. When it doesn't cure life, it cures all desire for voluntary death.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: death


I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


All ends in God; and many are the ways to find Him by walking straight before us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: walking


What is Art, monsieur, but Nature concentrated?

HONORE DE BALZAC

Lost Illusions

Tags: art


We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from stupidity, for it is acknowledged that in love all women have intellect.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: women


To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she is operating in your interest or in that of your wife.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: honesty


Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: power


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 hobby is a happy medium between a passion and a monomania.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Wisdom of Balzac

Tags: hobbies


This first entrance into life of two persons, during which a woman is encouraged by the hope of happiness, by the still fresh sentiment of her married duty, by the wish to please, by the sense of virtue which begins to be so attractive as soon as it shows love to be in harmony with duty, is called the honeymoon. How can it last long between two beings who are united for their whole life, unless they know each other perfectly? If there is one thing which ought to cause astonishment it is this, that the deplorable absurdities which our manners heap up around the nuptial couch give birth to so few hatreds! But that the life of the wise man is a calm current, and that of the prodigal a cataract; that the child, whose thoughtless hands have stripped the leaves from every rose upon his pathway, finds nothing but thorns on his return, that the man who in his wild youth has squandered a million, will never enjoy, during his life, the income of forty thousand francs, which this million would have provided—are trite commonplaces, if one thinks of the moral theory of life; but new discoveries, if we consider the conduct of most men. You may see here a true image of all honeymoons; this is their history, this is the plain fact and not the cause that underlies it.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man is never vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take the means to please her that a husband would recoil from.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: lies


Talent in love, as in every other art, consists in the power of forming a conception combined with the power of carrying it out.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: power


Old maids who have never yielded in their habits of life or in their characters to other lives and other characters, as the fate of woman exacts, have, as a general thing, a mania for making others give way to them.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: fate


In short, the terrible Raoul is grotesque. His movements are jerky, as if produced by imperfect machinery; his gait rejects all idea of order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and boulevards of Paris. His conversation, full of caustic humor, of bitter satire, follows the gait of his body; suddenly it abandons its tone of vengeance and turns sweet, poetic, consoling, gentle, without apparent reason; he falls into inexplicable silences, or turns somersets of wit, which at times are somewhat wearying. In society, he is boldly awkward, and exhibits a contempt for conventions and a critical air about things respected which makes him unpleasant to narrow minds, and also to those who strive to preserve the doctrines of old-fashioned, gentlemanly politeness; but for all that there is a sort of lawless originality about him which women do not dislike. Besides, to them, he is often most amiably courteous; he seems to take pleasure in making them forget his personal singularities, and thus obtains a victory over antipathies which flatters either his vanity, his self-love, or his pride.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: contempt


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


"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