“Young man,' Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare open-mouthed at a picture, 'Don't look at the canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“A line is a method of expressing the effect of light upon an object; but there are no lines in Nature, everything is solid. We draw by modeling, that is to say, that we disengage an object from its setting; the distribution of the light alone gives to a body the appearance by which we know it.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“But, after all, too much knowledge, like ignorance, brings you to a negation.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“[...]O que está faltando? Um nada, mas um nada que é tudo. Vocês têm a aparência da vida mas não expressam o seu excesso transbordante, esse não sei o quê que talvez seja a alma e que flutua enevoadamente sobre o invólucro[...]”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
Honoré de Balzac
Born place: in Tours, France
Born date May 20, 1799
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“shuffled their way through the cattle shoots in front of each restaurant’s counter.”
― Rachel Vincent, quote from My Soul to Lose
“Den lange, lange sti over myrene og inn i skogene hvem har trakket opp den? Mannen, mennesket, den første som var her. Det var ingen sti før ham. Siden fulgte et og annet dyr de svake spor over moer og myrer og gjorde dem tydeligere, og siden igjen begynte en og annen lapp å snuse stien opp og gå den når han skulle fra fjell til fjell og se til sin ren. Slik ble stien til gjennom den store almenning som ingen eiet, det herreløse land.”
― Knut Hamsun, quote from Growth of the Soil
“I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances
“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
“Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.”
― Mordecai Richler, quote from Solomon Gursky Was Here
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