Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Among fifty percent of your married couples, the husband worries very little about what his wife is doing, provided she is doing all he wishes.
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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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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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Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.
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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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Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|"tresse jusqu'a' lui; mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
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No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale.
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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.
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A mother's life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible. Not an hour but has its joys and fears.
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A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.
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We must certainly acknowledge that solitude is a fine thing; but it is a pleasure to have some one who can answer, and to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.
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A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.
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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 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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True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!
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By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions.
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A rent in your clothes is a mishap, a stain on them is a vice.
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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
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A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
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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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Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
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Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
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There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step.