Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac
Honoré de Balzacbal.zak], born Honoré Balzac, 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence La Comédie Humaine, which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his magnum opus...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 May 1799
CountryFrance
inspire suffering desire
Does not any limit imposed upon one inspire a desire to go beyond it? Does not our keenest suffering arise when our free will is crossed?
desire loyal doe
Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
desire vices desire-to-learn
Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.
women desire female
One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.
memories desire enjoyed
Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
art history humanity religion
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
inspirational men law
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
suicide wall writing
If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
simplicity inspire disrespect
Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gestures or quick movements inspire involuntary disrespect.
envy mediocrity pity
There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.
yield envy return
How can we explain the perpetuity of envy--a vice which yields no return?
source enjoyment
We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.
envy emotion insult
How natural it is to destroy what we cannot possess, to deny what we do not understand, and to insult what we envy!
children effort noble
The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph.