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
Love is to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love
No site in the forest is without significance, not a glade, not a thicket that does not provide analogies to the labyrinth of human thoughts. Who among those people with a cultivated spirit, or whose heart has been wounded, can walk in a forest without the forest speaking to him? … If one searched for the causes of that sensation, at once solemn, simple, gentle, mysterious, that seizes one, perhaps it would be found in the sublime and ingenious spectacle of all the creatures obeying their destinies, immutably docile.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Wilderness
The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Mothers, Forgiveness, Motherhood, Mothers Day
Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Blessings, Silver Linings
Someday you will find out that there is far more happiness in another’s happiness than in your own. It is something I cannot explain, something within that sends a glow of warmth all through you.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Joy
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
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Foolishness, Fools, Animals
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
Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Equality
I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
—Honore de Balzac
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Mothers, Family, Mother
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Art, Painting, Painters
Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Justice
Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man’s appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Eating
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Emotions
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Gratitude, Optimism, Misfortune, Blessings, Positive Attitudes, Exaggeration
Even beauty cannot palliate eccentricity.
—Honore de Balzac
Cruelty and fear shake hands together.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Cruelty
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
There are moments in life when all that we can bear is the sense that our friend is near us; our wounds would wince at consoling words that would reveal the depths of our pain.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Friendship
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
It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Marriage, Difficulty
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Faith, Divinity, God
Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Innocence
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation
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
Anybody who would like to travel as an archaeologist of mores and observe men instead of rocks could find an image of the century of Louis XV in some village in Provence, that of Louis XIV in Poitou, that of even more remote times in the far reaches of Brittany. Most of these cities have fallen from some splendor that historians, more preoccupied with dates than customs, no longer speak of, but whose memory lives on, such as in Brittany, where the national character scarcely accepts the forgetting of what this country is fundamentally about… All of these cities have their primitive character.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Travel
If we all said to people’s faces what we say behind one another’s backs, society would be impossible.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Gossip
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
Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hypocrisy, One liners, Manners
Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation, Role models
During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Simplicity
The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Spirituality
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Modesty, Conscience, Humility
There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.
—Honore de Balzac
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
A heap of ill-chosen erudition is but the luggage of antiquity.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Learning
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