Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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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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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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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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Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.
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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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The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
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Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
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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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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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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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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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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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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights.
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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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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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A husband who submits to his wife's yoke is justly held an object of ridicule. A woman's influence ought to be entirely concealed.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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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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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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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.