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
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
In diving to the bottom of pleasures we bring up more gravel than pearls.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Pleasure
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Family, Mothers, Mother
After all, our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Misfortune, Worry, Anticipation
No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife’s lover.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Vengeance
One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Life
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
Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Solitude
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Power
You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Imitation
There is no such thing as a great talent without great willpower.
—Honore de Balzac
Misfortune makes of certain souls a vast desert through which rings the voice of God.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Misfortune
In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Husbands
All happiness depends on courage and work.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Courage, Happiness
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
Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Hope
Coffee falls into the stomach … ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop … the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink…
—Honore de Balzac
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself. – Balzac, Honore De
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Acceptance, Confidence, Assurance
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Bureaucracy, Government
A heap of ill-chosen erudition is but the luggage of antiquity.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Learning
Even beauty cannot palliate eccentricity.
—Honore de Balzac
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
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: God, Faith, Divinity
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
Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Action
To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Laughter
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Exaggeration
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
Love is the poetry of the senses.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Love
The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Profit
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
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 errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Woman
Some one speaks admirably of the well-ripened fruit of sage delay.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Delay
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Painting, Art, Painters
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
When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Betrayal
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
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
Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
—Honore de Balzac
Topics: Jealousy, Envy
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