HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES XVIII

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

Now, among the petty miseries of human life the one for which the worthy priest felt the deepest aversion was the sudden sprinkling of his shoes, adorned with silver buckles, and the wetting of their soles.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: life


The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: genius


Passions are as mean as they are cruel.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve


Women will not suffer their idol to step down from his pedestal. They do not forgive the slightest pettiness in a god.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: God


Even thrones rise and fall in France with fearful rapidity. Fifteen years have wreaked their will on a great empire, a monarchy, and a revolution. No one can now dare to count upon the future.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: France


In the terrific tumult of raving passions, the holy Voice would have been unheard.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara


The dark glee, the savage ferocity aroused by the possession of a few water-white pebbles, set me shuddering. I was dumb with amazement.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck


The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: question


Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the child of heaven and earth.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: destiny


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 husband ought never to be the first to go to sleep and the last to awaken.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: sleep


If love is a child, passion is a man.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


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


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

Tags: desire


So thorough an old maid as Sylvie was certain to make good progress in the way of salvation.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: progress


Dost thou not see the nature of my love, a love without self-interest; a sentiment full of thee, thee only; a love which follows thee into the future to light that future for thee—for it is the one True Light. Canst thou now conceive with what ardor I would have thee leave this life which weighs thee down, and behold thee nearer than thou art to that world where Love is never-failing? Can it be aught but suffering to love for one life only? Hast thou not felt a thirst for the eternal love? Dost thou not feel the bliss to which a creature rises when, with twin-soul, it loves the Being who betrays not love, Him before whom we kneel in adoration?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


The higher thy flight the less canst thou see the abysses. There are none in heaven.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: Heaven


The final life, the fruition of all other lives, to which the powers of the soul have tended, and whose merits open the Sacred Portals to perfected man, is the life of Prayer.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: life


Though the comforts which all creatures desire, and for which he had so often longed, thus fell to his share, the Abbe Birotteau, like the rest of the world, found it difficult, even for a priest, to live without something to hanker for.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours

Tags: desire


One of the most important rules of the science of manners is an almost absolute silence in regard to yourself.

HONORE DE BALZAC

La Comédie Humaine

Tags: manners