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Honoré de Balzac quotes

6 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Honoré de Balzac wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.

Illustrated portrait of Honoré de Balzac

How these quotes were checked

How we decide whether a quote is genuine

Balzac's most famous sentences mostly come out of characters' mouths, and the difference matters: the men who say the sharpest things in his novels are usually the devils. Every quote above is checked verbatim against Ellen Marriage's standard English translations, and where a character is speaking, the card says who.

The line most often attributed to Balzac is checked below — it is a rewrite, not a quotation.

Four famous Hemingway quotes, fact-checked

A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.

Common paraphrase

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

What the novel prints, in Ellen Marriage's translation of Father Goriot, is: “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.” It is spoken by Vautrin, an escaped convict tempting a student — a character's argument, not Balzac's maxim. The famous short form is a rewrite that hardens “a great success for which you are at a loss to account” into “every great fortune”, which says something the text does not.

  • — Honoré de Balzac; trans. Ellen Marriage, Father Goriot — translated by Ellen Marriage (Project Gutenberg #1237) (1835)
Common paraphrase

“There are no principles; there are only events.”

Close but clipped: the translation reads “There are no such things as principles; there are only events, and there are no laws but those of expediency”. It is Vautrin speaking in Father Goriot, in the same speech as the line about crime and success.

  • — Honoré de Balzac; trans. Ellen Marriage, Father Goriot — translated by Ellen Marriage (Project Gutenberg #1237) (1835)
The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
— Vautrin (dialogue) · Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot (1835), translated by Ellen Marriage; spoken by Vautrin
There are no such things as principles; there are only events, and there are no laws but those of expediency: a man of talent accepts events and the circumstances in which he finds himself, and turns everything to his own ends.
— Vautrin (dialogue) · Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot (1835), translated by Ellen Marriage; spoken by Vautrin
Paris is in truth an ocean that no line can plumb. You may survey its surface and describe it; but no matter how numerous and painstaking the toilers in this sea, there will always be lonely and unexplored regions in its depths, caverns unknown, flowers and pearls and monsters of the deep overlooked or forgotten by the divers of literature.
— Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot (1835), translated by Ellen Marriage
Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either it is sublime, or it is not.
— Honoré de Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage (1829)
Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of death may take—To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm.
— The old antique dealer (dialogue) · Honoré de Balzac, The Magic Skin (1831), translated by Ellen Marriage; spoken by the old antique dealer
History is of two kinds—there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events—a scandalous chronicle.
— Carlos Herrera (dialogue) · Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions (1837–1843), translated by Ellen Marriage; spoken by Carlos Herrera

Questions about Honoré de Balzac quotes

Did Balzac say “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”?

Not in those words. The sentence in Father Goriot reads “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed” — and it is spoken by Vautrin, an escaped convict, not stated by Balzac. The short version is a later rewrite.

Why do so many Balzac quotes belong to Vautrin?

Vautrin — who also appears disguised as the priest Carlos Herrera in Lost Illusions — is Balzac's great tempter, and Balzac gives him the sharpest speeches about money, ambition and how Paris actually works. Quoting him as if he were Balzac flattens a character's temptation into an author's creed.

Which translation do these quotes use?

Ellen Marriage's translations of the Comédie humaine, the standard English versions from the 1890s, checked against the complete Project Gutenberg texts. The Physiology of Marriage quote comes from the complete Gutenberg translation of that book.

What is Balzac's most famous line about Paris?

From Father Goriot: “Paris is in truth an ocean that no line can plumb.” It is the narrator's own claim, made while introducing the shabby boarding house where the novel is set — even the city's dullest corner holds unexplored depths.

References

References

The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.

  1. 1Father Goriot — translated by Ellen Marriage (Project Gutenberg #1237)

    Novel
    Project Gutenberg, 1835
    Used for

    Father Goriot in Ellen Marriage's translation — three of the six quotes and both attribution checks.

    View source

  2. 2The Magic Skin (La Peau de chagrin) — translated by Ellen Marriage (Project Gutenberg #1307)

    Novel
    Project Gutenberg, 1831
    Used for

    The Magic Skin in Ellen Marriage's translation.

    View source

  1. 3The Physiology of Marriage, Complete (Project Gutenberg #16205)

    Essays
    Project Gutenberg, 1829
    Used for

    The complete translation of The Physiology of Marriage.

    View source

  2. 4Lost Illusions — translated by Ellen Marriage (Project Gutenberg #13159)

    Novel
    Project Gutenberg, 1843
    Used for

    Lost Illusions in Ellen Marriage's translation.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.

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