Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Honore de Balzac Novelist

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: France
  • Born: May 20, 1799
  • Died: Aug 18, 1850

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Edgar Allan Poe, Eça de Queirós, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school.

Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.

Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

A young bride is like a plucked flower but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.

Death unites as well as separates it silences all paltry feeling.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

A mother who is really a mother is never free.

At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.

When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.

Political liberty, the peace of a nation, and science itself are gifts for which Fate demands a heavy tax in blood!

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.

Love is the poetry of the senses.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion it is a joy of every moment.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

Power is action the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom to serve all, but love only one.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.