Honore de Balzac
Honore de Balzac
Honoré de Balzacbal.zak], born Honoré Balzac, 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 May 1799
CountryFrance
marriage fighting monsters
Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
marriage law maintenance
Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
marriage party fighting
Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
paris pretty-woman whim
Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
answers pleasure greater
Nothing can afford a woman greater pleasure than to hear tender words of love. The strictest, most devout woman will listen even if she must not answer.
powerful government order
What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?
mother loss hands
A woman, even a prude, is not long at a loss, however dire her plight. She would seen always to have in hand the fig leaf our Mother Eve bequeathed to her.
two males female
Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
pride animal earth
When one of those skirt-bearing animals has set herself up above all by permitting herself to be deified, no power on earth can be as proud as she.
promise fifteen talent
At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
men possession
Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
blow wind mobility
Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.
two kind poet
There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
men order color
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.