French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
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
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
Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem. In all that books tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false and true.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this investigation for the next century to carry out.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Although it is true that tender and delicate souls are found enveloped in a body of metallic hardness, at the same time there are souls of bronze enveloped in bodies so supple and capricious that their grace attracts the friendship of others, and their beauty calls for a caress.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Therefore you see, my friend, that I am not a woman. You do wrong to love me. What! am I to leave the ethereal regions of my pretended strength, make myself humbly small, cringe like the hapless female of all species, that you may lift me up? and then, when I, helpless and broken, ask you for help, when I need your arm, you will repulse me! No, we can never come to terms.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The heavy curtain of Bureaucracy was drawn between the right thing to be done and the right man to do it.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Les Employés
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
One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself.
HONORE DE BALZAC
La Comédie Humaine
Marriage may be considered in three ways, politically, as well as from a civil and moral point of view: as a law, as a contract and as an institution. As a law, its object is a reproduction of the species; as a contract, it relates to the transmission of property; as an institution, it is a guarantee which all men give and by which all are bound: they have father and mother, and they will have children. Marriage, therefore, ought to be the object of universal respect. Society can only take into consideration those cardinal points, which, from a social point of view, dominate the conjugal question.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Marriage is a tyranny.... Surely it is simply the keeping of a devil in a mob-cap!
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
To speak of love is to make love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Each household gathered in its chimney-corner, in houses carefully closed from the outer air, and well supplied with biscuit, melted butter, dried fish, and other provisions laid in for the seven-months winter. The very smoke of these dwellings was hardly seen, half-hidden as they were beneath the snow, against the weight of which they were protected by long planks reaching from the roof and fastened at some distance to solid blocks on the ground, forming a covered way around each building.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making a sacrifice.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Unite a fine intelligence with a dwarfed intelligence and you precipitate a disaster; for it is necessary that equilibrium be preserved in everything.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The old man’s lips were drawn in puckers, like a curtain, to either corner of his mouth.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a throne.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
None but the dupes, who fondly imagine that they are useful to their like, can interest themselves in laying down rules for political guidance amid events which neither they nor any one else foresees, nor ever will foresee.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck