HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES IV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth. These discordant combinations, far from moving the listener, arouse in him a feeling analogous to that which he would experience on seeing a rope-dancer hanging to a thread and swaying between life and death. Never does a soothing strain come in to mitigate the fatiguing suspense. It really is as though the composer had had no other object in view than to produce a baroque effect without troubling himself about musical truth or unity, or about the capabilities of human voices which are swamped by this flood of instrumental noise.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: death


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: nature


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


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


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

Tags: God


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


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


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


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


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


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: pleasure


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


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


The more one judges, the less one loves.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: birth


Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: life


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


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


In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance, owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: evil


Perhaps it is necessary to have been, like Nebuchadnezzar, something of a wild beast, and shut up in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes without other prey than the butcher’s meat doled out by the keeper, or a retired merchant deprived of the joys of tormenting his clerks, to understand the impatience with which the brother and sister awaited the arrival of their cousin Lorrain.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette