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When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
Honore de Balzac -
Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman!
Honore de Balzac
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The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.
Honore de Balzac -
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Honore de Balzac -
Only when one has learned to acknowledge that wiser minds have made better words to come out of our mouths may we truly, then, begin to speak them.
Honore de Balzac -
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.
Honore de Balzac -
The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
Honore de Balzac -
Women are ever the dupes or the victims of their extreme sensitiveness.
Honore de Balzac
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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.
Honore de Balzac -
Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.
Honore de Balzac -
Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
Honore de Balzac -
When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army.
Honore de Balzac -
Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
Honore de Balzac -
I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.
Honore de Balzac
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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
Honore de Balzac -
Memories beautify life, but the capacity to forget makes it bearable.
Honore de Balzac -
A husband can commit no greater blunder than to discuss his wife, if she is virtuous, with his mistress; unless it be to mention his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife.
Honore de Balzac -
Everybody all over the world takes a wife's estimate into account in forming an opinion of a man.
Honore de Balzac -
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.
Honore de Balzac -
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.
Honore de Balzac
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
Honore de Balzac -
Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
Honore de Balzac -
The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us.
Honore de Balzac -
Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire.
Honore de Balzac