Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined.
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Squeeze marriage as much as you like, you will never extract anything from it but fun for bachelors and boredom for husbands.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.
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He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things.
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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
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According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth.
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A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
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There are words which cut like steel.
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The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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Nature endows woman alternately with a particular strength which helps her to suffer and a weakness which counsels her to be resigned.
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A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
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Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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The fact is that love is of two kinds, one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
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People who are in love suspect nothing or everything.