Honore de Balzac Quotes
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When Religion and Royalty are swept away, the people will attack the great, and after the great, they will fall upon the rich.
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You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
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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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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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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
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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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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.
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One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.
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A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.
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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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A monster which devours everything - that is familiarity.
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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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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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There are words which cut like steel.
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Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
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In a world of hunchbacks, a fine figure becomes a monstrosity.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?