HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES VII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

We are the noblest of God’s greatest works. Has He not given us the faculty of reflecting on Nature; of gathering it within us by thought; of making it a footstool and stepping-stone from and by which to rise to Him? We love according to the greater or the lesser portion of heaven our souls contain. But do not be unjust, Minna; behold the magnificence spread before you. Ocean expands at your feet like a carpet; the mountains resemble amphitheaters; heaven’s ether is above them like the arching folds of a stage curtain. Here we may breathe the thoughts of God, as it were like a perfume. See! the angry billows which engulf the ships laden with men seem to us, where we are, mere bubbles; and if we raise our eyes and look above, all there is blue. Behold that diadem of stars! Here the tints of earthly impressions disappear; standing on this nature rarefied by space do you not feel within you something deeper far than mind, grander than enthusiasm, of greater energy than will? Are you not conscious of emotions whose interpretation is no longer in us? Do you not feel your pinions? Let us pray.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


Speed thy way through the luminous spheres; behold, admire, hasten! Flying thus thou canst pause or advance without weariness. Like other men, thou wouldst fain be plunged forever in these spheres of light and perfume where now thou art, free of thy swooning body, and where thy thought alone has utterance. Fly! enjoy for a fleeting moment the wings thou shalt surely win when Love has grown so perfect in thee that thou hast no senses left; when thy whole being is all mind, all love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


The lawyer, tall and thin, had liberal opinions in place of talent.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: lawyer


To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fortune


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


When people are ill, they have such strange fancies! They are like children, they do not know what they want.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: children


In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest admiration.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: admiration


The moment a wife decides to break her marriage vow she reckons her husband as everything or nothing.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: marriage


The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter. Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: nature


Girls brought up as you were, in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: happiness


What frightful tableaux might present themselves, if one could paint the ideas found in the souls of those who surround the deathbeds? And money is always the mobilizer of the intrigues elaborated, the plans formulated, the conspiracies woven!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: ideas


All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Louis Lambert

Tags: poetry


Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: love


Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


Most composers make use of the orchestral parts in a vague, incoherent way, combining them for a merely temporary effect; they do not persistently contribute to the whole mass of the movement by their steady and regular progress. Beethoven assigns its part to each tone-quality from the first. Like the various companies which, by their disciplined movements, contribute to winning a battle, the orchestral parts of a symphony by Beethoven obey the plan ordered for the interest of all, and are subordinate to an admirably conceived scheme.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: progress


If the man has genius ... he certainly has neither the constancy nor the patience which sanctifies it, and makes it a thing divine. He endeavors to impose on the world by placing himself on a level which he does nothing to maintain. True talent, pains-taking and honorable talent does not act thus. Men who possess such talent follow their path courageously; they accept its pains and penalties, and don’t cover them with tinsel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: talent


For a whole fortnight now, my dear, I have been living the life of society; one evening at the Italiens, another at the Grand Opera, and always a ball afterwards. Ah! society is a witching world.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: life


If a man cannot distinguish the difference between the pleasures of two consecutive nights, he has married too early.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Muse of the Department

Tags: women


Each night ought to have its menu.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: night