French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pierrette
How mad a man must appear when desire renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Everyday life cannot be cast in heroic mould. No doubt there seems, at any rate at first sight, no room left in this scheme of life for that longing after the infinite which expands the mind and soul. But what is there to prevent me from launching on that boundless sea our familiar craft?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Do for God what you do for your ambitious projects, what you do in consecrating yourself to Art, what you have done when you loved a human creature or sought some secret of human science. Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry? Surely His riches are worthy of being coveted! His treasure is inexhaustible, His poem infinite, His love immutable, His science sure and darkened by no mysteries.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
An honest woman is one whom her lover fears to compromise.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
True, I have my weak points; but were I a man, I should adore them. They arise from what is most promising in me.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Perhaps the mind cannot be complete at all points; perhaps artists of every kind live too much in the present moment to study the future; perhaps they are too observant of the ridiculous to notice snares, or they may believe that none would dare to lay a snare for such as they.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Now it is impossible for a woman who is perpetually at war with herself and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others in peace or refrain from envying their happiness.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
When a woman utters the name of a man but twice a day, there is perhaps some uncertainty about her feelings toward him—but if thrice?—Oh! oh!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
What woman wants pity?... A man's sternness is to us our only pardon.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Ferragus
Well, monsieur ... a musician always finds it difficult to reply when the answer needs the cooperation of a hundred skilled executants. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, without an orchestra would be of no great account.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
To beat a retreat with the honors of war has always been the triumph of the ablest generals.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Though the great things of life are simple to understand and easy to express, the littlenesses require a vast number of details to explain them.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Our fleeting happiness here below is the forerunning proof of another and a perfect happiness, just as the earth, a fragment of the world, attests the universe.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from the hands of God than these two girls from their mother’s home when they went to the mayor’s office and the church to be married, after receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they were to go than the maternal convent.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Man is the minister of Nature, and society engrafts itself upon her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides