Honore de Balzac Quotes
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A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.
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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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Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.
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Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.
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The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot.
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With monuments as with men, position means everything.
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Lofty souls are always inclined to make a virtue of misfortune.
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Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
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Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable.
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It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
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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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With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.
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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?
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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.
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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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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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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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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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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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Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!
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The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
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Man can start with aversion and end with love, but if he begins with love and comes round to aversion he will never get back to love.
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Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile.