Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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.
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If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
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Evasion is unworthy of us, and is always the intimate of equivocation.
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Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
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Love is the reduction of the universe to the single being, and the expansion of a single being, even to God.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
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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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Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.
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To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
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Good befalls us while we sleep, sometimes.
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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.
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The future of a nation lies in the hands of mothers.
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The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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As a rule, only the poor are generous.
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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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The happier a man, the more apt he is to tremble. In hearts exclusively tender, anxiety and jealousy are in exact proportion to happiness.
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Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.