Tao Te Ching

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Balzac

(Honoré de Balzac)

1799 – 1850 CE

(–1850)
Novelist, playwright, journalist, founding influence on European realism; Balzac only lived 51 years but wrote 92 novels, many short stories and plays. Famous for his 2000+ morally ambiguous and multi-faceted characters, he called himself a “Secretary of Society” and thought of his novels as a kind of history. He pioneered and made popular both the “novel of ideas” and the multi-generational, sequencing novel that carried characters from one story and period of their life to another. A dramatic failure in most of his life, he ran for a political office but only received 20 votes while just one of the other candidates had almost 160,000. No matter how much money he made, he was never self-supporting because of an insatiable appetite for luxuries and he had to frequently change homes and names to hide from creditors. Multiple business ventures failed miserably but his money-making optimism didn’t fade. His influence extended to luminaries like Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, Henry James, Akira Kurosawa and Friedrich Engels among many more.

Eras

Unlisted Sources

Cousin Bette

Ferragus, chef des Dévorants

Human Comedy

Le Père Goriot​

Père Goriot

The Physiality of Marriage, 1930

Quotes by Balzac (38 quotes)

“Nothing in the world exists as a single block. Everything is a mosaic. The history of the past may be told in chronological sequence, but you cannot apply the same method to the moving present.”

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“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”

Themes: Crime Wealth

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“Love is the poetry of the senses.”

Themes: Love Poetry

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

Themes: Marriage

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

Themes: Law and Order

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“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”

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“Reading brings us unknown friends.”

Themes: Books

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“All happiness depends on courage and work.”

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

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“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”

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

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“I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.”

from Père Goriot

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“Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?”

from Père Goriot

Themes: Meaningfulness

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

Themes: Equality

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“An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.”

Themes: Livelihood

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

Themes: Strategy Power

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“Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.”

Themes: Aggression Hate

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“The more he saw, the more he doubted… courage was often rashness; and prudence, cowardice; generosity, a clever piece of calculation; justice, a wrong; honesty, a modus vivendi; and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, generous, prudent or brave were held cheaply by their fellow-men.”

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“Marriage should war incessantly with that monster that is the ruin of everything, the monster of habit.”

from The Physiality of Marriage, 1930

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“Time is the only capital of those who just have their intelligence as fortune.”

Themes: Time

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“If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in, 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.”

from Cousin Bette

Themes: Art Perseverance

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“Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.”

from Père Goriot

Themes: Religion Love

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“One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.”

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

Themes: Desire

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“Seeking variety is a sign of impotence.”

from Cousin Bette

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“What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.”

from Ferragus, chef des Dévorants

Themes: Projection

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“I’d need rest to refresh my brain, and to get rest it’s necessary to travel, and to travel one must have money, and in order to get money you have to work. . . . I am in a vicious circle . . .from which it is impossible to escape.”

Themes: Money Travel

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“A man who prides himself on going in a straight line through life is an idiot who believes in infallibility.”

from Le Père Goriot​

Themes: Golden Chains

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

Themes: Ignorance

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“Glory is the sunshine of the dead.”

Themes: Fame

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“Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.”

Themes: Memory Forget

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“she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through —the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form”

from Cousin Bette

Themes: Curiosity

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

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“I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; only in man’s improvement in himself.”

Themes: Progress

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“Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.”

Themes: Sex Pleasure

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“Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.”

from Human Comedy

Themes: Evil

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

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“Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man”

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Quotes about Balzac (5 quotes)

“I have learned more from Balzac than all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.”

Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895 CE
Businessman-philosopher, political theorist

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“Writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate -- or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first-rate kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.”

Colin Wilson 1931 – 2013 CE
from The Books In My Life, 1998

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“Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was, He created life, he did not copy it.”

Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900 CE

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“A towering idol, I have learned [from Balzac] more of the lessons of engaging mystery of fiction than from anyone else.”

Henry James 1843 – 1916 CE

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“Balzac was a fairly consistent royalist and Catholic, anything but a reformer or a politician… A congenital bankrupt and an obsessive shopper, he was a genius at finding ways to be extravagant.”

Daniel J. Boorstin 1914 – 2004 CE
American intellectual Paul Revere
from The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, 1992

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