Quotes About Balzac

As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.

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

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

There is no more merciless mental vivisector unhanged than Marcia Kibbe Klaw. Compared to her ice-bright scalpel, Balzac and Thackeray wielded wands of whipped-cream and swans-down.

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.

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.

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

God is the poet; men are but the actors. The great dramas of earth were written in heaven.

Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears.

Modern science has killed the Fantastic, and with the Fantastic, Poetry—which is also Fantasy. The last Fairy is well and truly buried—or dried, like a rare flower, between two pages of Monsieur Balzac.

One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn't going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac's Paris was extremely comprehensive. I went instead to the undergraduate library, to the basement where government documents were stored.

When Robert and I are ambitious, we talk of buying Balzac in full some day, to put him up in our bookcase from the convent, if the carved-wood angels, infants and serpents, should not finish mouldering away in horror at the touch of him. But I fear it will rather be an expensive purchase, even here.

Most happily the cold spared us during our six days' journey, which was very pleasant. I like travelling by vetturino. The fatigue is small, and if you take a supply of books with you the time does not hang fire. We had some old Balzacs, which came new (he is one of our gods — heathen, you will say)

By the way, we have just been reading 'Vanity Fair.' Very clever, very effective, but cruel to human nature. A painful book, and not the pain that purifies and exalts. Partial truths after all, and those not wholesome. But I certainly had no idea that Mr. Thackeray had intellectual force for such a book; the power is considerable. For Balzac, Balzac may have gone out of the world as far as we are concerned. Isn't it hard on us? exiles from Balzac

Also, this library admits (is allowed to admit on certain conditions) some books forbidden generally by the censureship, which is of the strictest; and though Balzac appears very imperfectly, I am delighted to find him at all

She said that she did not see Balzac. Balzac went into the world scarcely at all, frequenting the lowest cafés, so that it was difficult to track him out. Which information I receive doubtingly. The rumours about Balzac with certain parties in Paris are not likely to be too favorable nor at all reliable, I should fancy; besides, I never entertain disparaging thoughts of my demi-gods unless they should be forced upon me by evidence you must know.

He spoke with a knowledge that's almost completely forgotten, and of which almost nothing completely verifiable can survive. He offered opinions rather than information. He spoke about Balzac as he might have done about himself, as if he himself had once tried to be Balzac. He had a sublime courtesy even in knowledge, a way at once profound and clear of handling knowledge without ever making it seem an obligation or a burden. He was sincere.

Curtius cierra así su comparación: «Balzac siente un ardiente interés por la vida y nos contagia su fuego; Flaubert, su náusea». Así es, y ésa es precisamente la razón por la que Flaubert es el primer novelista moderno.

The autobiographer, for his part, is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.

I don't say they love, my dear, but they are forced to lodge somewhere, like other men, and when they haven't a home of their own they lodge with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison.

These words struck the vicar a blow, which he felt the more because his late reverie had made him completely happy.

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

My further advice on your relations to women is based upon that other motto of chivalry, "Serve all, love one."

Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but well understood coquetry?