HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES IV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: life


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

Tags: love


Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: pleasure


The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: desire


I don’t say they love, my dear, but they are forced to lodge somewhere, like other men, and when they haven’t a home of their own they lodge with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: home


Fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


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

Tags: art


But in the glance at once tender and wild, swift and deep, which that woman’s black eyes had shot at him by stealth, there was such a world of buried sorrows and promised joys!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara


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

Tags: conscience


When there is an old maid in a house, watch-dogs are unnecessary; not the slightest event can occur that she does not see and comment upon and pursue to its utmost consequences.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: dogs


The sweetest of all consolations to suffering souls, to martyrs, to artists, in the worst of that divine agony which hatred and envy force upon them, is to meet with praise where they have hitherto found censure and injustice.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: artists


Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: trust


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

Tags: art


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

Tags: art


Infuse with passion, then, if you will, this friendship, and let the voice of love disturb its calm.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: friendship


For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him; he would not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the comfortless look of the room.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: apathy


A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: business


There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: pleasure


We must all agree that legality would be a fine thing for social scoundrelism IF THERE WERE NO GOD.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: God


The more one judges, the less one loves.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage