"Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 19 of 34)
668 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker."
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"Time is the only capital of those who just have their inteligence as fortune."
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"There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire."
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"Necessity is often the spur to genius."
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"Marriage must perforce fight against the all-devouring monster of habit."
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"When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power."
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"Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will."
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"By and large, women have a faith and a morality peculiar to themselves; they believe in the reality of everything that serves their interest and their passions."
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"There are words which cut like steel."
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"I yield to your wishes. It is the privilege of the women whom we love more than they love us to make the men who love them ignore the ordinary rules of common-sense."
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"We do not wish success yet we obtain it. Always we find what we are not looking for. These words are too true not to become a proverb some day."
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"Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position."
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"But also remember: if you have any genuine feelings, hide them like treasure; never let anyone so much as suspect them, or you're lost. Instead of being the executioner, you'll be the victim. And if you ever fall in love, keep that absolutely secret! Never breathe a word until you're completely sure of the person to whom you open your heart. And to protect that love, even before you feel it, learn to despise the world."
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"I am not deep, but I am very wide."
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"Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge."
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"Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter."
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"Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?"
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"We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are."
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"Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike."
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