HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES VI

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

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

Tags: nature


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

Tags: hunger


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


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


At the first introductory notes Gambara’s intoxication appeared to clear away and make way for the feverish excitement which sometimes brought his judgment and his imagination into perfect harmony; for it was their habitual disagreement, no doubt, that caused his madness. The ruling idea of that great musical drama appeared to him, no doubt, in its noble simplicity, like a lightning flash, illuminating the utter darkness in which he lived. To his unsealed eyes this music revealed the immense horizons of a world in which he found himself for the first time, though recognizing it as that he had seen in his dreams. He fancied himself transported into the scenery of his native land, where that beautiful Italian landscape begins at what Napoleon so cleverly described as the glacis of the Alps. Carried back by memory to the time when his young and eager brain was as yet untroubled by the ecstasy of his too exuberant imagination he listened with religious awe and would not utter a single word. The Count respected the internal travail of his soul. Till half-past twelve Gambara sat so perfectly motionless that the frequenters of the opera house took him, no doubt, for what he was—a man drunk.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gambara

Tags: doubt


Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: trust


The interest of a husband as much as his honor forbids him to indulge a pleasure which he has not had the skill to make his wife desire.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: desire


Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: women


God may seem to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in all things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita


Love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls, their lives.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


The whole woman nature stands before you; all look at her, but none can interpret her thoughts. But for you, the eye is more or less dimmed, wide-opened or closed; the lid twitches, the eyebrow moves; a wrinkle, which vanishes as quickly as a ripple on the ocean, furrows her brow for one moment; the lip tightens, it is slightly curved or it is wreathed with animation—for you the woman has spoken.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: nature


What a handsome woman it was that I saw in another moment! She had flung an Indian shawl hastily over her bare shoulders, covering herself with it completely, while it revealed the bare outlines of the form beneath. She wore a loose gown trimmed with snowy ruffles, which told plainly that her laundress’ bills amounted to something like two thousand francs in the course of a year. Her dark curls escaped from beneath a bright Indian handkerchief, knotted carelessly about her head after the fashion of Creole women. The bed lay in disorder that told of broken slumber. A painter would have paid money to stay a while to see the scene that I saw. Under the luxurious hanging draperies, the pillow, crushed into the depths of an eider-down quilt, its lace border standing out in contrast against the background of blue silk, bore a vague impress that kindled the imagination. A pair of satin slippers gleamed from the great bear-skin rug spread by the carved mahogany lions at the bed-foot, where she had flung them off in her weariness after the ball. A crumpled gown hung over a chair, the sleeves touching the floor; stockings which a breath would have blown away were twisted about the leg of an easy-chair; while ribbon garters straggled over a settee. A fan of price, half unfolded, glittered on the chimney-piece. Drawers stood open; flowers, diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a girdle, were littered about. The room was full of vague sweet perfume. And—beneath all the luxury and disorder, beauty and incongruity, I saw Misery crouching in wait for her or for her adorer, Misery rearing its head, for the Countess had begun to feel the edge of those fangs. Her tired face was an epitome of the room strewn with relics of past festival. The scattered gewgaws, pitiable this morning, when gathered together and coherent, had turned heads the night before.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: misery


A man must not flatter himself that he knows his wife, and is making her happy unless he sees her often at his knees.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage


To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: fortune


The lawyer, tall and thin, had liberal opinions in place of talent.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Pierrette

Tags: lawyer


Of all the miseries that civil war can bring upon a country the greatest lies in the appeal which one of the contestants always ends by making to some foreign government.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: government


In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest admiration.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: admiration


The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: women


A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Honorine


God would have been strangely unjust had he confined the testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied them to others. The brazen rod belongs to all.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: power