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

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Solitude

Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
—Honore de Balzac

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Fortune, Crime

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

A heap of ill-chosen erudition is but the luggage of antiquity.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Learning

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Woman

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 enjoyment have been intellectual joys.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Enjoyment

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Life

Finance, like time, devours its own children.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Money

Modesty is the conscience of the body.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Modesty, Conscience, Humility

I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: God, Faith, Divinity

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Bureaucracy, Government

Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Role models, Imitation

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn’t, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Career

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

The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Profit

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

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

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Cruelty

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

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

In diving to the bottom of pleasures we bring up more gravel than pearls.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure

All happiness depends on courage and work.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Courage, Happiness

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Equality

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Romance, Passion

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

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power, Truth

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love

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