"It's not enough to be a good person. You also have to show it."
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Honore de Balzac quotes (page 18 of 34)
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"Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird."
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"White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light."
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"One can imagine the look the two lovers exchanged; it was like a flame, for virtuous lovers have not a shred of hypocrisy."
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"The woman you buy takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself to you takes all your money."
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"Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audacious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest."
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"Inspiration is the opportunity of genius."
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"Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious."
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"Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it."
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"A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought."
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"To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely."
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"Several sorts of memory exist in us; body and mind each possesses one peculiar to itself. Nostalgia, for instance, is a malady of the physical memory."
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"He's got his dog trained so that it only does it on newspapers. The trouble is it does it when he's reading the blasted things."
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"We must have books for recreation and entertainment, as well as books for instruction and for business; the former are agreeable, the latter useful, and the human mind requires both. The cannon law and the codes of Justinian shall have due honor, and reign at the universities; but Homer and Virgil need not therefore be banished. We will cultivate the olive and the vine, but without eradicating the myrtle and the rose."
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"Behind every fortune there is a crime."
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"Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling."
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"The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it."
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"Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine."
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"Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it."
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"Woman is a most charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as she does her gloves."
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