Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Honore de Balzac (French Novelist)

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

It is as absurd to say that a man can’t love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love

During the great storms of our lives we imitate those captains who jettison their weightiest cargo.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Simplicity

When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Betrayal

The man who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother’s heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart!—this is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Art

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Marriage

After all, our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Worry, Anticipation, Misfortune

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love

Love is to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love

Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Failure

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
—Honore de Balzac

Necessity is often the spur to genius.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity, Necessity

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Painters, Art, Painting

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: Belief, Fate

Some troubles, like a protested note of a solvent debtor, bear interest.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Silver Linings, Blessings

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Justice

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: Difficulty, Marriage

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hatred, Hate

Love is the poetry of the senses.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Action

Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
—Honore de Balzac

Even beauty cannot palliate eccentricity.
—Honore de Balzac

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

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

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

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Forgiveness, Mothers, Motherhood, Mothers Day

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Emotions

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

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

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Misfortune, Optimism, Positive Attitudes, Exaggeration, Gratitude, Blessings

You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation

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