Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
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A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
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Believe everything you hear said of the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
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The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.
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An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
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Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
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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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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
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It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
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Many men nourish a pride which urges them to conceal their struggles and show themselves only as conquerors.
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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
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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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Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
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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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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
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Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
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Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.