Honore de Balzac Quotes
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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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Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
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One hour of love has a whole life in it.
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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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The causes that govern the heart appear to be wholly alien to the results achieved. Are the forces that moved a desperate criminal the same that fill a martyr with pride, as both mount the scaffold?
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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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 fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
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Danger arouses interest. Where death is involved, the vilest criminal invariably stirs a little compassion.
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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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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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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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What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.
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Resignation is a daily suicide.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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Paris, like every pretty woman, is subject to inexplicable whims of beauty and ugliness.
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Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune.
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A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.
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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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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
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The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can.
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Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
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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.