One can argue that on flat space {mathbb {R}}^d, the Weyl quantization is the most natural choice and that it has the best properties (e.g., symplectic covariance, real symbols correspond to Hermitian operators). On a generic manifold, there is no distinguished quantization, and a quantization is typically defined chart-wise. Here we introduce a quantization that, we believe, has the best properties for studying natural operators on pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. It is a generalization of the Weyl quantization—we call it the balanced geodesic Weyl quantization. Among other things, we prove that it maps square-integrable symbols to Hilbert–Schmidt operators, and that even (resp. odd) polynomials are mapped to even (resp. odd) differential operators. We also present a formula for the corresponding star product and give its asymptotic expansion up to the fourth order in Planck’s constant.