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Honoré de Balzac Quotes
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True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.
Honoré de Balzac
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White hair often covers the head, but the heart that holds it is ever young.
Honoré de Balzac
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All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
Honoré de Balzac
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If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history.
Honoré de Balzac
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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.
Honoré de Balzac
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Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things.
Honoré de Balzac
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You are dressed so coquettishly to talk about chemistry.
Honoré de Balzac
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Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,-she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
Honoré de Balzac
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If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.
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Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.
Honoré de Balzac
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Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.
Honoré de Balzac
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At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan.
Honoré de Balzac
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The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.
Honoré de Balzac
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They ended as all great passions do end - by a misunderstanding.
Honoré de Balzac
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A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.
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Is there any instinct more deeply implanted in the heart of man than the pride of protection, a protection which is constantly exerted for a fragile and defenceless creature?
Honoré de Balzac
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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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It is easier for a woman to be a good wife than a good mother. A widow has two duties with contrary obligations: she is a mother and she must exercise paternal authority. Few woman are strong enough to understand and to play this role.
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Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.
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A girl's coquetry is of the simplest, she thinks that all is said when the veil is laid aside; a woman's coquetry is endless, she shrouds herself in veil after veil, she satisfies every demand of man's vanity, the novice responds but to one.
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A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings.
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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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It is the mark of a great man that he puts to flight all ordinary calculations. He is at once sublime and touching, childlike and of the race of giants.
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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 vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin, — occupation.
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Honoré de Balzac
Born:
May 20, 1799
Died:
August 18, 1850
(aged 51)
Bio:
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright.
Known for:
Père Goriot (1835)
Eugénie Grandet (1833)
Cousin Bette (1846)
Illusions perdues (1837)
Colonel Chabert (1832)
Most used words:
love
woman
man
women
life
nature
heart
reason
husband
human
marriage
time
god
happiness
heaven
Honoré de Balzac on Wikipedia
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