"Rich women need not fear old age; their gold can always create about them any feelings necessary to their happiness."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 23 of 34)
668 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him."
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"The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?"
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"Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally."
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"The mind, too, has its regimen. It needs gymnastics, just like the body does."
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"I prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction, contemplation to activity."
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"Virtue in women is perhaps a question of temperament."
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"A girl fresh from a boarding school may perhaps be a virgin but no! she is never chaste."
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"Few men are raised in our estimation by being too closely examined."
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"You cannot pluck love out of your heart as you would pull a tooth."
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"She who is really a wife, one in heart, flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centered."
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"There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances."
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"A husband and wife who are in the habit of occupying separate rooms are either beings apart, or they have found happiness. Either they hate or they adore each other."
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"Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague."
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"The most real of all splendors are not in outward things, they are within us."
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"Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation."
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"Love is precisely to the moral nature what the sun is to the earth."
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"Loyalty in time of need is possibly one of the noblest of victories a courtier can win over himself."
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"Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?"
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"The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations."
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