Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Love is perhaps no more than gratitude for pleasure.
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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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Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop.
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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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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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Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.
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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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Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.
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No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
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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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A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
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No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.
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Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
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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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When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
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A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other.
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Authentic love always assumes the mystery of modesty, even in its expression, because actions speak louder than words. Unlike a feigned love, it feels no need to set a conflagration.
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No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover.
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The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.
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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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A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.
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Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine.
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When we drink coffee, ideas march in like the army.