Wit & Attitude Quote by Honore de Balzac

Balzac is doing that deliciously unromantic thing great novelists do: taking an emotion everyone flatters and turning it into a tool with collateral damage. “Passion” here isn’t candlelight and violin music; it’s a force that manufactures competence on the fly. Under its heat, even “simpletons, fools, and idiots” acquire “a sort of intelligence” - not the slow, earned kind, but a temporary, high-functioning cunning: the ability to read signals, improvise strategies, lie convincingly to oneself, and move with purpose.

The phrasing matters. “Be it observed” carries the tone of a man who has seen the same plot repeat across drawing rooms and cramped apartments: desire makes people suddenly perceptive, persuasive, brave. “A sort of intelligence” is the telltale qualifier. Balzac grants passion its power while quietly mocking it. What it produces isn’t wisdom; it’s situational brilliance, narrowly calibrated to the object of longing. You don’t become smarter in general - you become smarter at getting what you want, or at justifying what you’re about to do.

The kicker is “especially during youth.” Youth, in Balzac’s world, is when identity is still wet cement and ambition is basically a fever. Passion supplies the missing architecture: it gives the young a script, a mission, a sense of inevitability. That’s the subtextual sting. Passion can look like enlightenment because it concentrates attention so intensely it mimics insight. It’s a spotlight, not a map - and Balzac, chronicler of self-deception with excellent eyesight, wants you to notice the difference.