Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Society is no more indulgent than was the God of Genesis.
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Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
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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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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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Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally.
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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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People who climb from one rung of society to another can never do anything simply.
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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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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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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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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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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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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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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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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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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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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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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 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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In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.