French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
I have already seen hundreds of men, young and middle-aged; not one has stirred the least feeling in me. No proof of admiration and devotion on their part, not even a sword drawn in my behalf, would have moved me. Love, dear, is the product of such rare conditions that it is quite possible to live a lifetime without coming across the being on whom nature has bestowed the power of making one's happiness. The thought is enough to make one shudder; for if this being is found too late, what then?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
If men of imagination and good sense, like you, desert one camp only to join the other; if they cannot keep to the happy medium between two forms of extravagance, we shall always be exposed to the satire of the sophists, who deny all progress, who compare the genius of man to this tablecloth, which, being too short to cover the whole of Signor Giardini's table, decks one end at the expense of the other.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so little success attended the first.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If the role of an honest woman were nothing more than perilous ... I would admit that it would serve. But it is tiresome; and I have never met a virtuous woman who did not think about deceiving somebody.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment -- giving to that word its exact significance. Man does not create forces; he employs the only force that exists and which includes all others, namely Motion, the breath incomprehensible of the sovereign Maker of the universe.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Now it is impossible for a woman who is perpetually at war with herself and living in contradiction to her true life, to leave others in peace or refrain from envying their happiness.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
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
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
The higher thy flight the less canst thou see the abysses. There are none in heaven.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Therefore Prayer, issuing from so many trials, is the consummation of all truths, all powers, all feelings.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Le catechisme social
Clouds signify the veil of the Most High.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
If a man would have the right to make stepping-stones of all the heads which crowd a drawing-room, he must be the lover of some artistic woman of fashion.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If many man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from lack of willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to undergo the toils of this terrible duel, it is quite true that they must needs possess great moral force.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot