HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES II
French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the strictest tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he had once resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest. He himself had suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still remembered his unhappy childhood too well not to recognize, beneath the reserves of feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must have brought the heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured, embittered, or rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable, and ready to unclose to noble sentiments. Tyranny produces two opposite effects, the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of ancient slavery, Epictetus and Spartacus,—hatred and evil feelings on the one hand, resignation and tenderness, on the other.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Friendship is the bond between a pair of kindred souls, united in their strength, and yet independent. Let us be friends and comrades to bear jointly the burden of life.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Old men alone have time to love; young men are rowing ... the galleys of ambition.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
They who listen to only one bell hear only one sound.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
He weighed the diamonds, calculating the value of stones and setting at sight (Heaven knows how!), delight and severity struggling in the expression of his face the meanwhile. The Countess had plunged in a kind of stupor; to me, watching her, it seemed that she was fathoming the depths of the abyss into which she had fallen. There was remorse still left in that woman’s soul. Perhaps a hand held out in human charity might save her. I would try.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand franc bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is coming out of his pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that some one was carrying off his wife.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
But the maladies by which a man is afflicted do not nullify the sum total of human passion. To our shame be it spoken, a woman is never so much attached to us as when we are sick.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
This chatterer believed himself an orator.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
Humanity rolls out like a many-colored ribbon. See the diverse shades of that flower of the celestial gardens.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
When the fire was burning on the hearth, and the lamp was lighted, and Marianne had departed without saying, as usual, "Does Monsieur want anything more?" the Abbe Birotteau let himself fall gently into the wide and handsome easy-chair of his late friend; but there was something mournful in the movement with which he dropped upon it. The good soul was crushed by a presentiment of coming calamity. His eyes roved successively to the handsome tall clock, the bureau, curtains, chairs, carpets, to the stately bed, the basin of holy-water, the crucifix, to a Virgin by Valentin, a Christ by Lebrun,—in short, to all the accessories of this cherished room, while his face expressed the anguish of the tenderest farewell that a lover ever took of his first mistress, or an old man of his lately planted trees. The vicar had just perceived, somewhat late it is true, the signs of a dumb persecution instituted against him for the last three months by Mademoiselle Gamard, whose evil intentions would doubtless have been fathomed much sooner by a more intelligent man. Old maids have a special talent for accentuating the words and actions which their dislikes suggest to them. They scratch like cats. They not only wound but they take pleasure in wounding, and in making their victim see that he is wounded. A man of the world would never have allowed himself to be scratched twice; the good abbe, on the contrary, had taken several blows from those sharp claws before he could be brought to believe in any evil intention.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
The sculptor acts on the stone; he fashions it; he puts a realm of ideas into it. There are statues which the hand of man has endowed with the faculty of representing the noble side of humanity, or the whole evil side; most men see in such marbles a human figure and nothing more; a few other men, a little higher in the scale of being, perceive a fraction of the thoughts expressed in the statue; but the Initiates in the secrets of art are of the same intellect as the sculptor; they see in his work the whole universe of his thought.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Half of Paris sleeps amidst the putrid exhalations of courts and streets and sewers.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Can a man ever learn woman and know how to decipher this wondrous strain of music, by remaining through life like a seminarian in his cell? Is it possible that a man who makes it his business to think for others, to judge others, to rule others, to steal money from others, to feed, to heal, to wound others—that, in fact, any of our predestined, can spare time to study a woman? They sell their time for money, how can they give it away for happiness? Money is their god. No one can serve two masters at the same time. Is not the world, moreover, full of young women who drag along pale and weak, sickly and suffering? Some of them are the prey of feverish inflammations more or less serious, others lie under the cruel tyranny of nervous attacks more or less violent. All the husbands of these women belong to the class of the ignorant and the predestined. They have caused their own misfortune and expended as much pains in producing it as the husband artist would have bestowed in bringing to flower the late and delightful blooms of pleasure. The time which an ignorant man passes to consummate his own ruin is precisely that which a man of knowledge employs in the education of his happiness.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Really, his self-sufficiency is too much. I can’t stand that Jupiter Olympian air of his--the only mythological character exempt, they say, from ill-luck.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Vinet gave his wife the terrible, fixed, cold look with which men enforce their absolute dominion. The hapless helot, punished incessantly for not having the one thing that was wanted of her, a fortune, took up her cards.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
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
To saunter is a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.
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