Honore de Balzac Quotes
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For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
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Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
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Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
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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.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy.
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Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
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No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.
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She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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The greater a man's talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.
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There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
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In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.
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When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.