Honore de Balzac Quotes
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There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.
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We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.
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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
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In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge.
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Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
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When there is an old maid in the house, a watchdog is unnecessary.
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Great minds always tend to see virtue in misfortune.
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Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses.
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Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.
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No woman allows her lover to descend from his pedestal. Even a god is not forgiven the slightest pettiness.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man.
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Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.
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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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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.
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Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table.
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Man is no match for woman where mischief reigns.
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To get a traveling salesman drunk is the height of impossibility.
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By resorting to self-resignation, the unfortunate consummate.
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An ugly woman, married to King Henry VIII, would have defied the axe and daunted her husband's infidelities.
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We do not attach ourselves lastingly to anything that has not cost us care, labor or longing.
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Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
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A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.