French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Alas! we cannot understand each other on any point. We are separated by an abyss. You are on the side of darkness, while I—I live in the light, the true Light!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Woman understands all things through love; what she does not understand she feels; what she does not feel she sees; when she neither sees, nor feels, nor understands, this angel of earth divines to protect you, and hides her protection beneath the grace of love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
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
A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages—youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
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
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
So, with the enthusiasm of one who attains an object long desired, with the candor of a child, and the blundering foolishness of an old man utterly without worldly experience, he fell into the life of Mademoiselle Gamard precisely as a fly is caught in a spider’s web.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.
HONORE DE BALZAC
attributed, Words of Wisdom: Honore de Balzac
The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman's heart.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Yesterday, at the Italian Opera, I could feel some one was looking at me; my eyes were drawn, as by a magnet, to two wells of fire, gleaming like carbuncles in a dim corner of the orchestra. Henarez never moved his eyes from me. The wretch had discovered the one spot from which he could see me—and there he was. I don't know what he may be as a politician, but for love he has a genius.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations.
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
When she plays, an actress can live no life of her own; she can neither dress, nor eat, nor talk.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
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
The words fell as the axe of a skillful woodman falls at the root of a young tree and brings it down at a single blow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
We find in the unexplorable nature of the Spiritual World certain beings armed with these wondrous faculties, comparable only to the terrible power of certain gases in the physical world, beings who combine with other beings, penetrate them as active agents, and produce upon them witchcrafts, charms, against which these helpless slaves are wholly defenseless; they are, in fact, enchanted, brought under subjection, reduced to a condition of dreadful vassalage. Such mysterious beings overpower others with the scepter and the glory of a superior nature,—acting upon them at times like the torpedo which electrifies or paralyzes the fisherman, at other times like a dose of phosphorous which stimulates life and accelerates its propulsion; or again, like opium, which puts to sleep corporeal nature, disengages the spirit from every bond, enables it to float above the world and shows this earth to the spiritual eye as through a prism, extracting from it the food most needed.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita