Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit.
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Friendships last when each friend thinks he has a slight superiority over the other.
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Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
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With monuments as with men, position means everything.
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The duration of a couple's passion is in proportion to the woman's original resistance or to the obstacles that social hazards have placed in the way of her happiness.
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The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.
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Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.
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The man who enters his wife's dressing room is either a philosopher or a fool.
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Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it.
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All happiness depends on courage and work.
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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.
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The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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Everything is bilateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is the myth of criticism and the symbol of genius. Only God is triangular!
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It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
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The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.
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Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.
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In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.
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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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Possibly the words materialism and spirituality express two sides of one and the same fact.
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Women are happy to possess a man whom all women covet.
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Creole women take after Europe in their intelligence, after the Tropics in the illogical violence of their passions, and after the Indies in the apathetic indolence with which they commit or suffer good and evil.
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Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?