"Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 12 of 34)
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"Little minds find satisfaction for their feelings, good or bad, in little things."
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"A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love."
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"Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles."
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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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"Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks."
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"Doubt follows white-winged hope with trembling steps."
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"Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window."
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"Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect; without esteem they cannot exist; esteem is the first demand that they make of love."
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"Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love."
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"Love is a game in which one always cheats."
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"Finance, like time, devours its own children."
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"Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings."
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"The world will avenge itself upon all happiness in which it has no share."
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"Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?"
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"Glory is a poison, good to be taken in small doses."
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"If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life."
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"Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues."
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"A man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks for a dupe."
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"In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke."
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