French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Lost Illusions
Raise those great black eyes of yours, fixed on my opening sentence, and keep this excitement for the letter which shall tell you of my first love. By the way, why always "first?" Is there, I wonder, a second love?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem. In all that books tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false and true.
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
The old man’s lips were drawn in puckers, like a curtain, to either corner of his mouth.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Vice and disappointment and vindictiveness are the best of all detectives.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
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
Now, if a knowledge of mathematical laws gave us these four great musicians, what may we not attain to if we can discover the physical laws in virtue of which—grasp this clearly—we may collect, in larger or smaller quantities, according to the proportions we may require, an ethereal substance diffused in the atmosphere which is the medium alike of music and of light, of the phenomena of vegetation and of animal life! Do you follow me? Those new laws would arm the composer with new powers by supplying him with instruments superior of those now in use, and perhaps with a potency of harmony immense as compared with that now at his command. If every modified shade of sound answers to a force, that must be known to enable us to combine all these forces in accordance with their true laws.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
In the terrific tumult of raving passions, the holy Voice would have been unheard.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
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
In short, the terrible Raoul is grotesque. His movements are jerky, as if produced by imperfect machinery; his gait rejects all idea of order, and proceeds by spasmodic zig-zags and sudden stoppages, which knock him violently against peaceable citizens on the streets and boulevards of Paris. His conversation, full of caustic humor, of bitter satire, follows the gait of his body; suddenly it abandons its tone of vengeance and turns sweet, poetic, consoling, gentle, without apparent reason; he falls into inexplicable silences, or turns somersets of wit, which at times are somewhat wearying. In society, he is boldly awkward, and exhibits a contempt for conventions and a critical air about things respected which makes him unpleasant to narrow minds, and also to those who strive to preserve the doctrines of old-fashioned, gentlemanly politeness; but for all that there is a sort of lawless originality about him which women do not dislike. Besides, to them, he is often most amiably courteous; he seems to take pleasure in making them forget his personal singularities, and thus obtains a victory over antipathies which flatters either his vanity, his self-love, or his pride.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Ambitious men ought to follow curved lines, the shortest road in politics.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
"Women," she said, with tears in her eyes, "can only love; men act; they have a thousand ways in which they are bound to act. But we can only think, and pray, and worship."
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
The countess had longed for emotions, and now she had them,—terrible, cruel, and yet most precious. She lived a deeper life in pain than in pleasure.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Between persons who are perpetually in each other's company dislike or love increases daily; every moment brings reasons to love or hate each other more and more.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Feeble folk are as easily reassured as they are frightened.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
The girl of the golden eyes might be virgin, but innocent she was certainly not. The fantastic union of the mysterious and the real, of darkness and light, horror and beauty, pleasure and danger, paradise and hell, which had already been met with in this adventure, was resumed in the capricious and sublime being with which De Marsay dallied. All the utmost science or the most refined pleasure, all that Henri could know of that poetry of the senses which is called love, was excelled by the treasures poured forth by this girl, whose radiant eyes gave the lie to none of the promises which they made.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Little minds need to practise despotism to relieve their nerves, just as great souls thirst for equality in friendship to exercise their hearts.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Pierrette
A husband never loses anything by appearing to believe in the fidelity of his wife, by preserving an air of patience and by keeping silence. Silence especially troubles a woman amazingly.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage