French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
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Letters of Two Brides
So when we came together, the Countess and I, I understood at once the reason of her antipathy for me, disguised though it was by the most gracious forms of politeness and civility. I had been forced to be her confidant, and a woman cannot but hate the man before whom she is compelled to blush. And she on her side knew that if I was the man in whom her husband placed confidence, that husband had not as yet given up his fortune.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The wife of a banker is always an honest woman, but the woman who sits at the cashier’s desk cannot be one, unless her husband has a very large business and she does not live over his shop.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Judged from a literary point of view, Nathan lacks style and cultivation. Like most young men, ambitious of literary fame, he disgorges to-day what he acquired yesterday.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A young man, or an old man, perhaps, has but lately acquired possession of a young girl by a contract duly registered at the Town Hall, before heaven and on the rolls of the estate—a young girl with long hair, limpid black eyes, small feet, dainty tapering fingers, red lips, ivory teeth, and a good figure; tremulous, tempting, white as a lily, laden with all the treasures of loveliness imaginable; her drooping eyelashes resembling the sharp points of a crown; her skin, as fresh as the corolla of a white camelia, tinted with the purple of the darker-hued camelia; on whose clear complexion can be seen the bloom borne by young fruit, and the well-nigh invisible down of the dappled peach, her blue veins spreading a rich warmth over this transparent network; she asks for life, she is ready to give life; she is full of love and joy, of gracefulness and simplicity. She loves her husband, or at least she thinks she loves him.... The lover and the husband has said in his heart, 'These eyes shall see me only, for me alone shall this mouth quiver with love, this soft hand shall bestow the treasures of fleeting pleasure only upon me, this bosom heave but at my voice, but at my will shall this sleeping soul awake; I alone shall run my fingers through these shining tresses, I alone cover this eager, trembling head with dreamy caresses. I will make Death keep watch by my pillow to defend the nuptial-bed from the spoiler; this throne of love shall swim either in the blood of the unwary or in my own. Rest, honour, happiness, paternal bonds, the fate of my children, all he there; I will guard them as a lioness guards her whelps. Woe to him who puts foot in my lair!'
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Here I am ready to make my bow to the world. By way of preparation I have been trying to commit all the follies I could think of before sobering down for my entry.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
According to the greater or lesser violence of your sensual passion, you have perhaps discerned some of those twenty-two pleasures which in other times created in Greece twenty-two kinds of courtesans, devoted especially to these delicate branches of the same art.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Andrea shot a swift look at Marianna, who was watching him. And he noted the beautiful Italian head, the exquisite proportion and rich coloring that revealed one of those organizations in which every human power is harmoniously balanced, he sounded the gulf that divided this couple, brought together by fate. Well content with the promise he inferred from this dissimilarity between the husband and wife, he made no attempt to control a liking which ought to have raised a barrier between the fair Marianna and himself. He was already conscious of feeling a sort of respectful pity for this man, whose only joy she was, as he understood the dignified and serene acceptance of ill fortune that was expressed in Gambara's mild and melancholy gaze.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Canst thou comprehend, my poor beloved Tried-one, that unless the torpor and the veils of sleep had wrapped thee, such sights would rend and bear away thy mind as the whirlwinds rend and carry into space the feeble sails, depriving thee forever of thy reason? Dost thou understand that the Soul itself, raised to its utmost power can scarcely endure in dreams the burning communications of the Spirit?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all substitute words for ideas, phrases for feelings, and their soul becomes a larynx.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
All the epigrams written against the little sex—for it is antiquated nowadays to say the fair sex—ought to be disarmed of their point and changed into madrigals of eulogy! All men ought to consider that the sole virtue of a woman is to love and that all women are prodigiously virtuous, and at that point to close the book and end their meditation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
When a young woman suddenly takes up religious practices which she has before abandoned, this new order of life always conceals a motive highly significant, in view of her husband’s happiness. In the case of at least seventy-nine women out of a hundred this return to God proves that they have been inconsistent, or that they intend to become so.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
We must all agree that legality would be a fine thing for social scoundrelism IF THERE WERE NO GOD.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette