Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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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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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.
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Woman is stronger by virtue of her feelings than man by virtue of his power.
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When one has no particular talent for anything, one takes to the pen.
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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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The most virtuous women have within them something that is never chaste.
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Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
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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.
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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 jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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It's catastrophies which turn wise and strong people into philosophers.
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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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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.
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I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity.
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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.
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One admirable trait in women is their lack of illusions about themselves. They never reason about their most blameworthy actions; their feelings carry them away. Even their dissimulation comes naturally to them, and in them crime is free of all baseness. Most of the time they simply do not know how it happened.
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Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not.
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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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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
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Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.