HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XXI

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


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

Tags: law


A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: France


Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry indeed beside the light which bathes a Seer.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: light


The bad points of others show out so strongly against the good that they usually strike our eyes before they wound us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours


Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.

HONORE DE BALZAC

attributed, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources

Tags: misfortune


Tone is light in another shape. In music, instruments perform the functions of the colors employed in painting.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: light


Anything may be expected and anything may be supposed of a woman who is in love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


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

Tags: family


Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: power


Happiness in marriage results in perfect union of soul between a married pair. Hence it follows that in order to be happy a man must feel himself bound by certain rules of honor and delicacy. After having enjoyed the benefit of the social law which consecrates the natural craving, he must obey also the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves. If he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love sincerely: nothing can resist a genuine passion.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: happiness


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

Tags: love


A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making a sacrifice.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: free will


All ends in God; and many are the ways to find Him by walking straight before us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: walking


The girl of the golden eyes might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they made.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: pleasure


In short, the terrible Raoul is grotesque. His movements are jerky, as if produced by imperfect machinery; his gait rejects all idea of order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and boulevards of Paris. His conversation, full of caustic humor, of bitter satire, follows the gait of his body; suddenly it abandons its tone of vengeance and turns sweet, poetic, consoling, gentle, without apparent reason; he falls into inexplicable silences, or turns somersets of wit, which at times are somewhat wearying. In society, he is boldly awkward, and exhibits a contempt for conventions and a critical air about things respected which makes him unpleasant to narrow minds, and also to those who strive to preserve the doctrines of old-fashioned, gentlemanly politeness; but for all that there is a sort of lawless originality about him which women do not dislike. Besides, to them, he is often most amiably courteous; he seems to take pleasure in making them forget his personal singularities, and thus obtains a victory over antipathies which flatters either his vanity, his self-love, or his pride.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: contempt


Ambitious men ought to follow curved lines, the shortest road in politics.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: Men


There are, without counting grocers and drapers, so many people who, to kill time, occupy themselves in seeking for the hidden motives which direct women's actions, that it is a work of charity to classify by titles and in chapters all the private circumstances of marriage; a good index will enable them to put their finger on the motions of their wives' hearts, just as logarithmic tables give them the product of any two numbers.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: charity


You should let your wife recline all day long on soft armchairs, in which she sinks into a veritable bath of eiderdown or feathers; you should encourage in every way that does no violence to your conscience, the inclination which women have to breathe no other air but the scented atmosphere of a chamber seldom opened, where daylight can scarcely enter through the soft, transparent curtains.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: conscience


We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from stupidity, for it is acknowledged that in love all women have intellect.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: women