French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
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
You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that height of devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the garments of the saints.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Felix’s wife began to find monotony in an Eden so well arranged; the perfect happiness which the first woman found in her terrestrial paradise gave her at length a sort of nausea of sweet things, and made the countess wish, like Rivarol reading Florian, for a wolf in the fold. Such, judging by the history of ages, appears to be the meaning of that emblematic serpent to which Eve listened, in all probability, out of ennui.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Music is at once a science and an art. It is rooted in physics and mathematics, hence it is a science; inspiration makes it an art, unconsciously utilizing the theorems of science. It is founded in physics by the very nature of the matter it works on. Sound is air in motion. The air is formed of constituents which, in us, no doubt, meet with analogous elements that respond to them, sympathize, and magnify them by the power of the mind.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
But in the glance at once tender and wild, swift and deep, which that woman’s black eyes had shot at him by stealth, there was such a world of buried sorrows and promised joys!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Singular creature, he had never cared to find out a single relative among four generations counted on the female side. The thought of his heirs was abhorrent to him; and the idea that his wealth could pass into other hands after his death simply inconceivable.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him; he would not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the comfortless look of the room.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Infuse with passion, then, if you will, this friendship, and let the voice of love disturb its calm.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
We must laugh no more at the government, my friends, since it has found the means of raising fifteen hundred millions in taxes. Clergymen, bishops, monks, and nuns are not yet rich enough to allow of their drinking at home among themselves; but only let St. Michael, who drove the Devil out of heaven, appear, and we shall perhaps see the good old times come back again!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter. Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
There is often more pleasure in suffering than in happiness; look at the martyrs!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
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
When people are ill, they have such strange fancies! They are like children, they do not know what they want.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
But you must not give the name of virtuous woman to her who, in her struggle against an involuntary passion, has yielded nothing to her lover whom she idolizes. She does injury in the most cruel way in which it can possibly be done to a loving husband. For what remains to him of his wife? A thing without name, a living corpse. In the very midst of delight his wife remains like the guest who has been warned by Borgia that certain meats were poisoned; he felt no hunger, he ate sparingly or pretended to eat. He longed for the meat which he had abandoned for that provided by the terrible cardinal, and sighed for the moment when the feast was over and he could leave the table.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If there are differences between one moment of pleasure and another, a man can always be happy with the same woman.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
And yet, the natural selfishness of all human beings, reinforced by the selfishness peculiar to the priesthood and that of the narrow life of the provinces had insensibly, and unknown to himself, developed within him. If any one had felt enough interest in the good man to probe his spirit and prove to him that in the numerous petty details of his life and in the minute duties of his daily existence he was essentially lacking in the self-sacrifice he professed, he would have punished and mortified himself in good faith. But those whom we offend by such unconscious selfishness pay little heed to our real innocence; what they want is vengeance, and they take it.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours