Top 100 Quotes About Balzac: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Balzac

#1. What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.

#2. Succotash my Balzac, dipshiitake.

#3. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.

Dai Sijie

#4. He was bursting with enthusiasms. He probably loved many things: the hawk in flight, the god-damned ocean, full moon, Balzac, bridges, stage plays, the Pulitzer Prize, the piano, the god-damned Bible.

Charles Bukowski

#5. I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

Twyla Tharp

#6. Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton

#7. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

William Faulkner

#8. The only street I like is Rue Honore de Balzac, because 'Balzac' sound so gay, and I love my gays. I might like Parisians more if they named their streets only for gay icons, like Rue Liza Minnelli or Rue Bette Midler or, my favorite, Rue McClanahan.

Joan Rivers

#9. You know, Balzac once described bureaucracy as a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." "What'd your buddy Balzac have to say about inadmissible evidence?" "Not a lot. I think he considered the subject beneath him.

Craig Johnson

#10. She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.

Dai Sijie

#11. I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

Maya Angelou

#12. My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

Umberto Eco

#13. The Englishman's approach to vulgarity is so clumsy that it makes it seem dirtier than it really is, but the Frenchman lifts it with a light, dexterous touch onto a plane of inimitable humour. To go to bed with Balzac is to know what one has missed all one's life.

Jean Lucey Pratt

#14. I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.

Friedrich Engels

#15. Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.

Gore Vidal

#16. In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35

Amos Oz

#17. There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it's the upkeep that costs, that's what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

Joanna Walsh

#18. Balzac's ambition was to be omnipotent. He would be Michelangelesque, and that by sheer force of minuteness. He exaggerated scientifically, and made things gigantic by a microscopic fulness of detail.

William Ernest Henley

#19. Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

W. H. Auden

#20. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Virginia Woolf

#21. . . . when a woman has a husband
And you've got none,
Why should she take advice from you?
Even if you can quote Balzac and Shakespeare
And all them other highfalutin' Greeks.

Meredith Willson

#22. It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.

Willa Cather

#23. Balzac loved courtesans. They were independent women, and in the 19th century, that was a breed that was just evolving.

Twyla Tharp

#24. I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#25. Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.

Honore De Balzac

#26. When a woman starts talking about her duty, her regard for appearances, and her respect for religion, she raises so many bulwarks which she delights to see captured by storm.

Honore De Balzac

#27. We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.

Honore De Balzac

#28. A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.

Honore De Balzac

#29. Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.

Honore De Balzac

#30. The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.

Honore De Balzac

#31. Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.

Honore De Balzac

#32. All human beings go through a previous life ... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?

Honore De Balzac

#33. We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#35. Noble hearts are neither jealous nor afraid because jealousy spells doubt and fear spells pettiness.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#37. A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.

Honore De Balzac

#38. The more a man judges, the less he loves

Honore De Balzac

#39. I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#41. Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

Honore De Balzac

#42. Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.

Honore De Balzac

#43. To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.

Honore De Balzac

#44. Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

Honore De Balzac

#45. Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.

Honore De Balzac

#46. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

Honore De Balzac

#47. In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.

Honore De Balzac

#48. A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Honore De Balzac

#49. Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown

Honore De Balzac

#50. He will show you how, during the springtime of life, illusions, innocent hopes, silver threads of gossamer, descend from heaven and return there without ever touching the earth.

Honore De Balzac

#51. Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#53. Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.

Honore De Balzac

#54. Remorse is impotent; it will repeat its faults. Repentance only is a true force; it puts an end to everything.

Honore De Balzac

#55. If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.

Honore De Balzac

#56. Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

Honore De Balzac

#57. When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.

Honore De Balzac

#58. Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.

Honore De Balzac

#59. Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

Honore De Balzac

#60. Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.

Honore De Balzac

#61. The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.

Honore De Balzac

#62. Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life, seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its wild creations.

Honore De Balzac

#63. The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.

Honore De Balzac

#64. For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Honore De Balzac

#65. Misfortune is a stepping stone for genius, the baptismal font of Christians, treasure for the skillful man, an abyss for the feeble.

Honore De Balzac

#66. A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.

Honore De Balzac

#67. The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.

Honore De Balzac

#68. A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life

Honore De Balzac

#69. It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

Honore De Balzac

#70. If ye were of this world the world would love you, but I have chosen you out of the world; be ye therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.

Honore De Balzac

#71. When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.

Honore De Balzac

#72. Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.

Honore De Balzac

#73. When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?

Honore De Balzac

#74. The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.

Honore De Balzac

#75. The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others
existences which the spirit alone remembers, for matter has no memory for spiritual things.

Honore De Balzac

#76. Economized love is never real love.

Honore De Balzac

#77. So he immolated himself. He made the sacrifice because he was a father; he went into voluntary exile. His daughters were satisfied, so he thought that he had done the best thing he could; but it was a family crime, and father and daughters were accomplices.

Honore De Balzac

#78. The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?

Honore De Balzac

#79. Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!

Honore De Balzac

#80. Pure herring oil is the port wine of English cats

Honore De Balzac

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

Honore De Balzac

#82. Give to a wounded heart seclusion; consolation nor reason ever effected anything in such a case.

Honore De Balzac

#83. No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion.

Honore De Balzac

#84. No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea.

Honore De Balzac

#85. A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.

Honore De Balzac

#86. Lovers have a way of using this word, nothing, which implies exactly the opposite.

Honore De Balzac

#87. Instead of inspiring the gallant attentions which other women seek, she made men dream,

Honore De Balzac

#88. By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.

Honore De Balzac

#89. Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?

Honore De Balzac

#90. Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.

Honore De Balzac

#91. Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

Honore De Balzac

#92. Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

Honore De Balzac

#93. Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her.

Honore De Balzac

#94. The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.

Honore De Balzac

#95. It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.

Honore De Balzac