Honoré de Balzac Quotes (1799-1850)

“Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser’s gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys.”

“Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.”

“The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.”

“The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.”

“The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.”

“Persons without minds are like bad weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within.”

“For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.”

“The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society. “Why don’t they get married?” cries a religious woman. But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at twenty years of age? Is not the danger of these precocious unions apparent at all? It would seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in those who conform to it. All the world knows what Rousseau said: “There must always be a period of libertinage in life either in one state or another. It is an evil leaven which sooner or later ferments.” Now what mother of a family is there who would expose her daughter to the risk of this fermentation when it has not yet taken place?”

“En France, et dans la partie la plus grave de l'histoire moderne, aucune femme, si ce n'est Brunehault ou Frédégonde, n'a plus souffert des erreurs populaires que Catherine de Médicis ; tandis que Marie de Médicis, dont toutes les actions on été préjudiciables à la France, échappe à la honte qui devrait couvrir son nom... Catherine de Médicis, au contraire, a sauvé la couronne de France ; elle a maintenu l'authorité royale dans des des circonstances au milieur desquelles plus d'un grand prince aurait succombé.Ayant en tête des factieux et des ambitions comme celles des Guise et de la maison de Bourbon, des hommes commes les deux cardinaux de Lorraine et comme les deux Balafrés, les deux princes de Condé, la reine Jeanne d'Albret, Henri IV, le connétable de Montmorency, Calvin, les Coligny, Théodore de Bèze, il lui a fallu déployer les plus rares qualités, les plus précieux dons de l'homme d'État, sous le feu des railleries de la presse calviniste.”

“Le pouvoir est une action, et le principe électif est la discussion.Il n'y a pas de politique possible avec la discussion en permanence.”

“Qui dit examen, dit révolte.Toute révolte est, ou le manteau sous lequel se cache un prince, ou les langes d'une domination nouvelle.”

“Pierre l'Ermite, Calvin et Robespierre, chacun à trois cents ans de distance, ces trois Picards ont été, politiquement parlant, des leviers d'Archimède.C'était à chaque époque une pensée qui recontrait un point d'appel dans les intérêts et chez les hommes.”

“Il est certain que pendant le seizième siècle, dans les années qui le précédèrent et le suivirent, l'empoisonnement était arrivé à une perfection inconnue à la chimie moderne et que l'histoire a constatée. L'Italie, berceau des sciences modernes, fut, à cette époque, inventrice et maîtresse de ces secrets dont plusieurs se perdirent.”

“Quand la religion et la royauté seront abattues, le peuple en viendra aux grands, après les grands il s'en prendra aux riches.”

“Les idées dévorent les siècles comme les hommes sont dévorés par leurs passions. Quand l'homme sera guéri, l'humanité se guérira peut-être.”

“La liberté politique, la tranquillité d'une nation, la science même, sont des présents pour lesquels le destin prélève des impôts de sang !”

“Balzac's reaction was somewhat different, but in its own way no less flattering. The novelist had become a good friend of both Aurore's and Jules Sandeau's, and they had been amused to see him use the money earned by his La Peau de Chagrin to transform his low-ceilinged apartment on the Rue Cassini into an "assemblage of marquises' boudoirs" — as George Sand later described it — with walls dripping in a feminine exuberance of silk and lace. Once, after entertaining them to a dinner of boiled beef, melons, and champagne (his standard fare), he had insisted on accompanying them home as far as the Luxembourg Gardens arrayed in a lovely new dressing gown and with a handsome brass candlestick to light the way, explaining as they went that no robber would dream of attacking him — taking him either for a dangerous madman or a prince whom it would be wiser to respect.”