Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions.
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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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The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule.
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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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The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does.
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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.
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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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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.
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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
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All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded; they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
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The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument.
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I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.
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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.
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The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
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One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy.
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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 habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.
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A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
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A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
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I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.