Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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Whereas scoundrels become reconciled after knifing one another, lovers break up irrevocably over a mere glance or word.
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Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy.
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One exits with one's husband -- one lives with one's lover.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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For a sick man the world begins at his pillow and ends at the foot of his bed.
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A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct.
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There are no principles; there are only events. There is no good and bad, there are only circumstances.
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Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
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Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises.
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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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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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A mother's happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
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Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion.
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Happiness lends poetic charms to woman, and dress adorns her like a delicate tinge of rouge.
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Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves.
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Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.
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God reveals Himself, unfailingly, to the solitary, thoughtful seeker.
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Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...
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Poles offer a mobility like that of the wind that blows over the immense plains and marches of Poland. Show a Pole a precipice, and he will leap headlong over it.
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Love is the most melodious of all harmonies.