Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a prolific French novelist and playwright. He is sometimes called “the Shakespeare of the novel.”
Born in Tours, France, Balzac studied law and worked in a law office in Paris for three years before embarking on a career as a writer. By age 29, Balzac had no success as a writer. He also failed in many business ventures and was deeply in debt for much of his life. To keep ahead of his creditors, he worked feverishly. He napped often and wrote 14 hours a day, sustaining himself with massive amounts of pipe tobacco, food, and innumerable cups of strong black coffee. It is estimated that he consumed some 50,000 cups of coffee during his lifetime—something that probably contributed to his death.
Between 1830 and 1832, Balzac published Scènes de la Vie privée (Scenes from Private Life,) a series of six novelettes that finally brought him literary attention. In 1833, Balzac came to a decision to redefine the scope and the structure of his novels so that his distinct books would become chapters in an ever-expanding fictional universe. Balzac opted to pull his old and new novels together through recurring characters and themes and present a cohesive picture of French life. He called this project La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy.) By the end of his life, The Human Comedy incorporated over 90 novels and novellas, and included over 2,000 identified characters.
No novelist wrote as many good novels as Balzac. He gained notoriety as a printer’s nightmare. He frequently rewrote and recast his novels from printer’s proofs, at great expense to himself.
Balzac’s vivacity, as well as his innovative paradigm of what the novel and the novelist can do to portray the human and social experience in all its complexity, make him one of the most influential celebrities in the history of fiction.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Honore de Balzac
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Exaggeration
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Passion, Romance
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Humility, Modesty, Conscience
Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Poverty
Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Jealousy, Envy
A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Husbands
One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Life
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Mothers, Mother, Family
The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Fortune
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Mothers
In diving to the bottom of pleasures we bring up more gravel than pearls.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure
The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their public monuments or from their domestic relics. Archaeology is to social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized nature. A mosaic reveals an entire society, just as a skeleton of an ichthyosaur suggests an entire creation. Everything is deducible, everything is linked. The cause allows one to guess the effect, just as each effect allows one to reconstruct a cause. The scientist can resuscitate in this manner even the warts of ancient times. From this comes without doubt the prodigious interest that an architectural description can inspire when the writer’s fantasy is faithful to its basic elements. Cannot each person reattach it to its past by rigorous deductions? And as for man, does not the past singularly resemble the future? Tell him what was and is this not almost always the same thing as telling him what will be?
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Science
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Marriage
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Solitude
To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Inheritance
Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
—Honore de Balzac
A woman has this quality in common with the angels, that those who suffer belong to her.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Woman
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Painters, Art, Painting
If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring and youth—the former from the year, the latter from human life.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure
During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Simplicity
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Crime
Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Satisfaction
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Career
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals—that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Ideals
It is a singular fact that many men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in a divine providence.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Fate, Belief
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself. – Balzac, Honore De
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Acceptance, Assurance, Confidence
A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Marriage
The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Woman
Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Friends and Friendship
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