French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
There is no good fete without a morrow.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Music, like painting, makes use of materials which have the property of liberating this or that property from the surrounding medium and so suggesting an image. The instruments in music perform this part, as color does in painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same, according to the pitch,—quite regular when the combination is a true chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,—I say that music is an art conceived in the very bowels of nature.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Le Siècle
For some days I have begun to tremble when I think of the destiny of women, and to understand why so many wear a sad face beneath the flush brought by the unnatural excitement of social dissipation. Marriage is a mere matter of chance. Look at yours. A storm of wild thoughts has passed over my mind. To be loved every day the same, yet with a difference, to be loved as much after ten years of happiness as on the first day!—such a love demands years. The lover must be allowed to languish, curiosity must be piqued and satisfied, feeling roused and responded to.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
A lover has all the good points and all the bad points which are lacking in a husband.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
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
As the eye glances over a map of the coasts of Norway, can the imagination fail to marvel at their fantastic indentations and serrated edges, like a granite lace, against which the surges of the North Sea roar incessantly? Who has not dreamed of the majestic sights to be seen on those beachless shores, of that multitude of creeks and inlets and little bays, no two of them alike, yet all trackless abysses? We may almost fancy that Nature took pleasure in recording by ineffaceable hieroglyphics the symbol of Norwegian life, bestowing on these coasts the conformation of a fish’s spine, fishery being the staple commerce of the country, and well-nigh the only means of living of the hardy men who cling like tufts of lichen to the arid cliffs. Here, through fourteen degrees of longitude, barely seven hundred thousand souls maintain existence. Thanks to perils devoid of glory, to year-long snows which clothe the Norway peaks and guard them from profaning foot of traveler, these sublime beauties are virgin still; they will be seen to harmonize with human phenomena, also virgin—at least to poetry—which here took place, the history of which it is our purpose to relate.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The bad points of others show out so strongly against the good that they usually strike our eyes before they wound us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this world.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
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
Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
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
People exaggerate both happiness and unhappiness; we are never so fortunate nor so unfortunate as people say we are.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Modeste Mignon
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They are silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see nothing.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Your wife ought to drink water, lightly tinged with a Burgundy wine agreeable to her taste, but destitute of any tonic properties; every other kind of wine would be bad for her. Never allow her to drink water alone; if you do, you are lost...
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete--for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
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
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