"No navigator has yet traced lines of latitude and longitude on the conjugal sea."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 11 of 34)
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"A lover teaches a wife all her husband has kept from her."
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"A man wastes his time going to hear some of our eloquent modern preachers; they may change his opinions, but never his conduct."
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"A woman must be a genius to create a good husband."
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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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"In the first woman we love, we love everything. Growing older, we love the woman only."
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"Love, according to our contemporary poets, is a privilege which two beings confer upon one another, whereby they may mutually cause one another much sorrow over absolutely nothing."
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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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"Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow."
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"The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman."
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"Virtue is not a thing you can have by halves; it is or it is not."
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"A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die."
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"Our most bitter enemies are our own kith and kin. Kings have no brothers, no sons, no mother!"
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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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"A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over."
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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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"A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion."
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"Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?"
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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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"Men are perfectly willing to abandon a woman but they refuse to be abandoned by her."
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