Honore de Balzac Quotes
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You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil.
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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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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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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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A naked woman is less dangerous than one who spreads her skirt skillfully to cover and exhibit everything at once.
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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
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A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
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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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The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.
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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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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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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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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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How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
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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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A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste.
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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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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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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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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But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite.
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Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.
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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.