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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Discouragement is of all ages: In youth it is a presentiment, in old age a remembrance.
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There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.
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The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.
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There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.
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Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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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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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.
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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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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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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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When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
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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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Temperament is the thermometer of character.
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No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
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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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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
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Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
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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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As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural.