Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer de faute. A husband, like a government, never needs to admit a fault.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
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To forget is the great secret of strong creative natures; to forget is the way nature herself who knows no past and who at every hour begins the mysteries of her untiring labors afresh.
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A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.
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[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.
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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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What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
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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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The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.
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Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.
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Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he 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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What makes friendship indissolute and what doubles its charms is a feeling we find lacking in love: I mean certitude.
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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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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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A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.