Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
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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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Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. Misfortune is a stepping stone for a genius, a piscina for a Christian, a treasure for a man of parts, and an abyss for a weakling.
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Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all.
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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
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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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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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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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You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
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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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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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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
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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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Behind every fortune there is a crime.
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The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
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Isn't it really quite extraordinary to see that, since man took his first step, no one has asked himself why he walks, how he walks, if he has ever walked, if he could walk better, what he achieves in walking .. questions that are tied to all the philosophical, psychological, and political systems which preoccupy the world.
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It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it.
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An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
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One hour of love has a whole life in it.