Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.
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The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
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Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing.
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A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.
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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it.
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Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her.
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To feel, to love, to suffer, to devote herself, will always be the text of the life of woman.
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To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
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Nothing is unimportant to a man plunged in despair. He is as credulous as a criminal sentenced to death who listens to a lunatic raving to him about how he can escape through the keyhole.
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All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
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It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
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L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.
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No woman has ever existed who did not know perfectly well in her heart what to expect from the superiority or inferiority of a rival.