Le Père Goriot is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac , included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in Paris in 1819, it follows the intertwined lives of three characters: the elderly doting Goriot, a mysterious criminal-in-hiding named Vautrin and a naive law student named Eugène de Rastignac.
“Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt.”
Part I.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
Context: Our heart is a treasury; if you pour out all its wealth at once, you are bankrupt. We show no more mercy to the affection that reveals its utmost extent than we do to another kind of prodigal who has not a penny left.
L'homme est imparfait. Il est parfois plus ou moins hypocrite, et les niais disent alors qu'il a ou n'a pas de mœurs.
Part II.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
Variant: Man is imperfect. He is at some times more or less hypocritical than at others, and then simpletons say that his morality is high or low.
"Je réussirai!"
Le mot du joueur, du grand capitaine, mot fataliste qui perd plus d'hommes qu'il n'en sauve.
Part I.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
“I am tormented by temptations."
"What kind? There is a cure for temptation."
"What?"
"Yielding to it.”
Je suis tourmenté par de mauvaises idées.
— En quel genre? Ça se guérit, les idées.
- Comment?
- En y succombant.
Part II.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.
Part II
A variant, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime," has appeared as a quotation of Balzac; but it may have originated in a paraphrase in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, p. 47: "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime." It also appears at the beginning of the novel "The Godfather," published two years earlier.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
“If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.”
Part I.
Le Père Goriot (1835)
Context: The next day Rastignac dressed himself very elegantly, and about three o'clock in the afternoon went to call on Mme. de Restaud. On the way thither he indulged in the wild intoxicating dreams which fill a young head so full of delicious excitement. Young men at his age take no account of obstacles nor of dangers; they see success in every direction; imagination has free play, and turns their lives into a romance; they are saddened or discouraged by the collapse of one of the visionary schemes that have no existence save in their heated fancy. If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
