French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Well, gold contains all things in embryo; gold realizes all things for us.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
In Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is a desire, and hatred a whim; there’s no true kinsman but the thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay imitated nature.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Tyranny produces two results, exactly opposite in character, and which are symbolized in those two great types of the slave in classical times -- Epictetus and Spartacus. The one is hatred with its evil train, the other meekness with its Christian graces.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Seen from a distance, Raoul Nathan was a very fine meteor. Fashion accepted his ways and his appearance. His borrowed republicanism gave him, for the time being, that Jansenist harshness assumed by the defenders of the popular cause, while they inwardly scoff at it--a quality not without charm in the eyes of women.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
In the dark recesses of a porter’s lodge, beneath the tiles of an attic roof, many a poor girl dreams, on returning from the theatre, of pearls and diamonds, gold-embroidered gowns and sumptuous girdles; she fancies herself adored, applauded, courted; but little she knows of that treadmill life, in which the actress is forced to rehearsals under pain of fines, to the reading of new pieces, to the constant study of new roles.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
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
What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Man is the minister of Nature, and society engrafts itself upon her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
His life flowed soundless as the sands of an hour-glass.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
It is so natural, socially speaking, to laugh at the failings of others that we ought to forgive the ridicule our own absurdities excite, and be annoyed only by calumny.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
By remaining unmarried, a creature of the female sex becomes void of meaning; selfish and cold, she creates repulsion.
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
The married woman who is the most chaste may be also the most voluptuous.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
La Duchesse de Langeais
To sum up, the world is mine without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest hold on me.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Vice and disappointment and vindictiveness are the best of all detectives.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck