"Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 16 of 34)
668 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Our happiness often depends upon social hypocrisies to which we will never stoop."
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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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"When a woman wants to betray her husband, her actions are almost invariably studied but they are never reasoned."
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"For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy?"
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"No husband will ever be better avenged than by his wife's lover."
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"Yes, I can understand that a man might go to a gambling table when he sees that all that lies between him and death is his last crown."
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"Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects."
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"When will conventional good manners become attractive? When will ladies of fashion exhibit their shoulders a little less and their affability and wit a little more?"
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"Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice."
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"Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking; love has found."
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"With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite."
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"The questioning spirit is the rebellious spirit. A rebellion is always either a cloak to hide a prince, or the swaddling wrapper of a new rule."
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"As soon as man seeks to penetrate the secrets of Nature--in which nothing is secret and it is but a question of seeing--he realizes that the simple produces the supernatural."
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"Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors."
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"Handsome widows, after a twelve-month, enjoy a latitude and longitude without limit."
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"Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul."
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"Genuine sorrows are very tranquil in appearance in the deep bed they have dug for themselves. But, seeming to slumber, they corrode the soul like that frightful acid which penetrates crystal."
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"Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes."
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"Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it."
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