HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.

HONORE DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: soul


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


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


Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are more numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than the caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences of our own life have revealed to us on the subject of love, arms us celibates with a terrible power: we are the lion of the Gospel seeking whom we may devour.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


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


A woman's life begins with her first passion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: life


You, you sybarites, canting bigots, vagabonds, hypocrites, sneaks, cudgellers, bucks, pilgrims, and such like, who are disguised as masqueraders to cheat the world! .... to heel, hounds; get out of the way! Away, pudden-heads! What, are you still there, in the devil's name?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders--Matter and Spirit. In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: universe


Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: prayer


Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: language


Often it is some girl in love, some gray-headed merchant on the verge of bankruptcy, some mother with a son’s wrong-doing to conceal, some starving artist, some great man whose influence is on the wane, and, for lack of money, is like to lose the fruit of all his labors—the power of their pleading has made me shudder. Sublime actors such as these play for me, for an audience of one, and they cannot deceive me. I can look into their inmost thoughts, and read them as God reads them. Nothing is hidden from me. Nothing is refused to the holder of the purse-strings to loose and to bind. I am rich enough to buy the consciences of those who control the action of ministers, from their office boys to their mistresses. Is not that power?—I can possess the fairest women, receive their softest caresses; is not that Pleasure? And is not your whole social economy summed up in terms of Power and Pleasure?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: power


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


If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


All human power is a compound of time and patience.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Eugénie Grandet

Tags: power


One thought borne inward, one prayer uplifted, one suffering endured, one echo of the Word within us, and our souls are forever changed.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: prayer


To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: law


Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: genius


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


Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

HONORE DE BALZAC

A Woman of Thirty

Tags: love