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

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

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

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

Envy lurks at the bottom of the human heart, like a viper in its hole.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Envy

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

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

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

A man’s own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Vanity

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

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

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

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

Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hope

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

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

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

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

All human power is a compound of time and patience.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power

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

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Marriage

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

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

Even beauty cannot palliate eccentricity.
—Honore de Balzac

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Innocence

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