French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
How hungry one's heart gets!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady’s window.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Romans et contes philosophiques
Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
To beat a retreat with the honors of war has always been the triumph of the ablest generals.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
What an admirable maneuver it would be to make a wife dance, and to feed her on vegetables!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A husband should never let his wife visit her mother unattended.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Oh! after ten years of marriage to find under his roof, and to see all the time, a young girl of from sixteen to eighteen, fresh, dressed with taste, the treasures of whose beauty seem to breathe defiance, whose frank bearing is irresistibly attractive, whose downcast eyes seem to fear you, whose timid glance tempts you, and for whom the conjugal bed has no secrets, for she is at once a virgin and an experienced woman! How can a man remain cold, like St. Anthony, before such powerful sorcery, and have the courage to remain faithful to the good principles represented by a scornful wife, whose face is always stern, whose manners are always snappish, and who frequently refuses to be caressed? What husband is stoical enough to resist such fires, such frosts? There, where you see a new harvest of pleasure, the young innocent sees an income, and your wife her liberty. It is a little family compact, which is signed in the interest of good will.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
In these times, liberty is no longer proscribed; it is going its rounds again.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
A good mind protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother's place in warding off evil.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
HONORé DE BALZAC
attributed, And I Quote
Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or an imbecile.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps, will some day find its Dante.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Love consists almost always in conversation. There are few things inexhaustible in a lover: goodness, gracefulness and delicacy. To feel everything, to divine everything, to anticipate everything; to reproach without bringing affliction upon a tender heart; to make a present without pride; to double the value of a certain action by the way in which it is done; to flatter rather by actions than by words; to make oneself understood rather than to produce a vivid impression; to touch without striking; to make a look and the sound of the voice produce the effect of a caress; never to produce embarrassment; to amuse without offending good taste; always to touch the heart; to speak to the soul—this is all that women ask. They will abandon all the delights of all the nights of Messalina, if only they may live with a being who will yield them those caresses of the soul, for which they are so eager, and which cost nothing to men if only they have a little consideration.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Lily of the Valley
Most men have no other views in marrying, than reproduction, property or children; but neither reproduction nor property nor children constitutes happiness. The command, "Increase and multiply," does not imply love. To ask of a young girl whom we have seen fourteen times in fifteen days, to give you love in the name of law, the king and justice, is an absurdity worthy of the majority of the predestined.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage