Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God.
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
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Sensuality is the death of the soul.
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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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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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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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The greatest tyranny is to love I where we are not loved again.
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
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The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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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's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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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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Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!
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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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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
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Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.
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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.