Honore de Balzac Quotes
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There is a cure for temptation. What? Yielding to it.
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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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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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth.
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The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared.
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Economized love is never real love.
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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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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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Marriage is an institution necessary to the maintenance of society but contrary to the laws of nature.
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Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.
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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration.
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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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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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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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All human power is a compound of time and patience.
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We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.
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When tempted to be unfaithful, the intellectual woman will try to inspire her husband with indifference, the sentimental woman with hatred, and the passionate woman with disgust.