French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Science is the language of the Temporal world, Love is that of the Spiritual world.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Silliness has two ways of comporting itself; it talks, or is silent. Silent silliness can be borne.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
So thorough an old maid as Sylvie was certain to make good progress in the way of salvation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
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
The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of one woman only!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
You, you sybarites, canting bigots, vagabonds, hypocrites, sneaks, cudgellers, bucks, pilgrims, and such like, who are disguised as masqueraders to cheat the world! .... to heel, hounds; get out of the way! Away, pudden-heads! What, are you still there, in the devil's name?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If love is the first of the passions, it is because it gratifies them all.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so little success attended the first.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
In the terrific tumult of raving passions, the holy Voice would have been unheard.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Know this for certain—methods are always confounded with results; you will never succeed in separating the soul from the senses, spirit from matter.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
Man dies in despair while the Spirit dies in ecstasy.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
HONORE DE BALZAC
"Letters of Two Brides", The Wisdom of Balzac
There is no good fete without a morrow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Thus your invisible moral universe and your visible physical universe are one and the same matter. We will not separate properties from substances, nor objects from effects. All that exists, all that presses upon us and overwhelms us from above or from below, before us or in us, all that which our eyes and our minds perceive, all these named and unnamed things compose—in order to fit the problem of Creation to the measure of your logic—a block of finite Matter; but were it infinite, God would still not be its master.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita