Honore de Balzac Quotes About Literature
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For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.
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Love is a game in which one always cheats.
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When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.
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Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.
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Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.
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Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.
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First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
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A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
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A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
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Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love.
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Small natures require despotism to exercise their sinews, as great souls thirst for equality to give play to their heart.
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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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The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.
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When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
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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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Lovers have a way of using this word "nothing" which implies exactly the opposite.
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We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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The life of a man who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a business speculation; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and acquaintances are his capital.
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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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Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
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Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.
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Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
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Thought is a key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoyments have been intellectual joys.
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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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What is art? Nature concentrated.
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