"Our energies are often stimulated by the necessity of supporting a being weaker than ourselves."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 24 of 34)
668 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes."
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"The day will dawn when Europe will believe only in the man who tramples her underfoot."
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"For the journalist, anything probable is gospel truth."
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"A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage."
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"Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle."
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"We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment."
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"Rich men are resolved to be astonished at nothing. When they see a masterpiece, they must needs at one glance recognize some flaw to dispense them from admiration, a vulgar emotion."
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"Women? In order to realize how far these charming creatures we idealize can carry their cruelty, we must see them among themselves!"
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"The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, forgotten because it was properly done."
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"Love is the only way on which even the dim-witted reaches certain heights."
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"At thirty years a woman asks her lover to give her back the esteem she has forfeited for his sake; she lives only for him, her thoughts are full of his future, he must have a great career, she bids him make it glorious; she can obey, entreat, command, humble herself, or rise in pride; times without number she brings comfort when a young girl can only make moan."
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"Pity is woman's sweetest charm."
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"One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love."
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"France is a country that loves to change their government if it is always the same."
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"In Paris every man must have had a love affair. What woman wants something that no other woman ever wanted."
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"Like most young people, these two attributed to the world their own intelligence and virtues. Youth who knows no failure has no mercy on the faults of other people; but it has also a sublime faith in them."
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"A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent."
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"The national budget is not a safe-deposit box. It is a spray can."
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"All men can bear a familiar, definite misfortune better than the cruel alternations of a fate which, from one moment to another, brings excessive joy or sorrow."
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