HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XIV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

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


Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: gold


How, alas! are we to explain, while respecting the honor of all the peoples, the problem which results from the fact that three millions of burning hearts can find no more than four hundred thousand women on which they can feed? Should we apportion four celibates for each woman and remember that the honest women would have already established, instinctively and unconsciously, a sort of understanding between themselves and the celibates, like that which the presidents of royal courts have initiated, in order to make their partisans in each chamber enter successively after a certain number of years?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: women


I am a galley slave to pen and ink.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letter to Zulma Carraud, July 2, 1832

Tags: writing


A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: words


In the matter of repartees literary celebrities are often not as quick as women.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: women


A woman's thought is endowed with incredible elasticity. When she receives a knockdown blow, she bends, seems crushed, and then renews her natural shape in a given time.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: thought


We cannot measure the vast orbit of the Divine thought of which we are but an atom as small as God is great; but we can feel its vastness, we can kneel, adore, and wait.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: God


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: sun


In a moment he had poured out a thousand foolish words to her, with the rapidity of a torrent coursing between the rocks, and repeating the same sound in a thousand different forms.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: words


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


The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: principles


Let the man whom I deign to love beware how he thinks of anything but loving me!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: love


The apparition of that august old woman, in her Breton costume, shrouded in her coif (a sort of hooded mantle of black cloth), accompanied by Brigaut, appalled Sylvie; she fancied she saw death.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: death


Correspondence, in which the pen is always bolder than speech, and thought, wreathing itself with flowers, allows itself to be seen without disguise.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: flowers


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


A woman's life begins with her first passion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: life


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: light


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage