Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose.
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A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
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I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
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Hope is a light diet, but very stimulating.
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Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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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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Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
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When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
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Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
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If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
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It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
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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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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.
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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit.
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A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.
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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.