Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.
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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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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only.
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Such is life. It is no cleaner than a kitchen; it reeks like a kitchen; and if you mean to cook your dinner, you must expect to soil your hands; the real art is in getting them clean again, and therein lies the whole morality of our epoch.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered.
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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.
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A grass blade believes that men build palaces for it to grow in. Grass wedges its way between the closest blocks of marble and it brings them down. This power of feeble life which can creep in anywhere is greater than that of the mighty behind their cannons.
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They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them.
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The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
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Man's condition is horrible because, no matter what form his happiness may take, it arises from some species of ignorance.
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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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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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Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.
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A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve.
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A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
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Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.