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
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Passion, Romance
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
Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Justice
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
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
A heap of ill-chosen erudition is but the luggage of antiquity.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Learning
We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The canon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor and reign at the universities, but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.
—Honore de Balzac
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
Finance, like time, devours its own children.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Money
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hope
A woman has this quality in common with the angels, that those who suffer belong to her.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Woman
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
Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Thought
When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
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
Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Foolishness, Animals, Fools
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
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Solitude
Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Failure
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation
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
In diving to the bottom of pleasures we bring up more gravel than pearls.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure
There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.
—Honore de Balzac
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even out virtues.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Women
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
Modesty is the conscience of the body.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Modesty, Conscience, Humility
When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Betrayal
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
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Flowers
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
Alfred de Musset French Poet, Playwright
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand French Writer, Statesman
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) French Writer
Gustave Flaubert French Novelist
Guy de Maupassant French Short-story Writer
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Jules Verne French Novelist
Colette French Novelist, Performer
Edith Wharton American Novelist, Short-story Writer