HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES IV

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: marriage


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


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


Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is another old woman.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: age


White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: Heaven


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


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

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: pleasure


The wife of a banker is always an honest woman, but the woman who sits at the cashier’s desk cannot be one, unless her husband has a very large business and she does not live over his shop.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: business


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


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


Most composers make use of the orchestral parts in a vague, incoherent way, combining them for a merely temporary effect; they do not persistently contribute to the whole mass of the movement by their steady and regular progress. Beethoven assigns its part to each tone-quality from the first. Like the various companies which, by their disciplined movements, contribute to winning a battle, the orchestral parts of a symphony by Beethoven obey the plan ordered for the interest of all, and are subordinate to an admirably conceived scheme.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: progress


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


Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: trust


Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: children


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 people are ill, they have such strange fancies! They are like children, they do not know what they want.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: children


The more one judges, the less one loves.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


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


Suicide, moreover, was at that time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: life


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