Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Inspiration is the opportunity of genius.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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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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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
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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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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.
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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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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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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
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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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The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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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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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
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Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes.
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I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.