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Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.
Honore de Balzac -
He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.
Honore de Balzac
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Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
Honore de Balzac -
Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.
Honore de Balzac -
Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
Honore de Balzac -
Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
Honore de Balzac -
There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
Honore de Balzac -
Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?
Honore de Balzac
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Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.
Honore de Balzac -
I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.
Honore de Balzac -
Love knows nothing of modesty.
Honore de Balzac -
There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.
Honore de Balzac -
Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.
Honore de Balzac -
The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them.
Honore de Balzac
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Vulgar souls look hastily and superficially at the sea and accuse it of monotony; other more privileged beings could spend a lifetime admiring it and discovering new and changing phenomena that delight them. So it is with love.
Honore de Balzac -
One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
Honore de Balzac -
The election of a deputy to the Legislature offers a noble and majestic spectacle comparable only to the delivery of a child. It involves the same efforts, the same impurities, the same laceration, and the same triumph.
Honore de Balzac -
In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
Honore de Balzac -
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
Honore de Balzac -
The great secret of social alchemy is to profit best from each stage in our lives, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, and all its fruits in autumn.
Honore de Balzac
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When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.
Honore de Balzac -
By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.
Honore de Balzac -
Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.
Honore de Balzac -
Poets and men of action differ: the former yield to their feelings in order to reproduce them in lively colors, and therefore judge only ex post facto; the latter feel and judge at one and the same time.
Honore de Balzac