H Balzac Quotes

Narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyrannizing cruelly or beneficially over others.

Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.

if my memory serves me right, here is my genealogical line: Boccaccio, Petronius, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky (and other Russian writers of the Nineteenth Century), the ancient Greek dramatists, theElizabethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare), Theodore Dreiser, Knut Hamsun, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, everything I read about China, India, Tibet, Arabia, Africa, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the Bible rather than its “message” which I got first and which I will never shake off.

Il s’est rencontré, sous l’Empire et dans Paris, treize hommes également frappés du même sentiment, tous doués d’une assez grande énergie pour être fidèles à la même pensée, assez probes entre eux pour ne point se trahir, alors même que leurs intérêts se trouvaient opposés, assez profondément politiques pour dissimuler les liens sacrés qui les unissaient, assez forts pour se mettre au-dessus de toutes les lois, assez hardis pour tout entreprendre, et assez heureux pour avoir presque toujours réussi dans leurs desseins ; ayant couru les plus grands dangers, mais taisant leurs défaites ; inaccessibles à la peur, et n’ayant tremblé ni devant le prince, ni devant le bourreau, ni devant l’innocence ; s’étant acceptés tous, tels qu’ils étaient, sans tenir compte des préjugés sociaux ; criminels sans doute, mais certainement remarquables par quelques-unes des qualités qui font les grands hommes, et ne se recrutant que parmi les hommes d’élite. Ferragus, Préface, Honoré de Balzac

Three common themes in poetry: life, death, union, and separation. P.B. Shelley speaks to us about the acceptance of death and the possibility of transcendent union. H. Heine goes further, through the negation of life and the transcendent union in death. Balzac, in the end, with a spirit of balance, speaks to us about the ambivalence between life and death. Personally, I hold the thesis that death is the negation of life itself; where one exists, the other cannot. Thus, nothingness cannot exist for the self, except in simulation. Death is always contemplated by the other, who, in contemplating its cold visage, is reminded of the possibility of their own end and becomes terrified. The ego is an immortal transcendence in projection and emptiness in itself. If I could encapsulate what I would like to express in a maxim, it would be: “Consciousness, in life, unites all that, in life, whether united or separated, will be entirely nullified by death.

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. —Honoré Balzac,4 19th century novelist and playwright