"Our most natural feelings are those we are loath to confess, and fatuity is among them."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 25 of 34)
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"A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life"
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"True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit."
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"Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state."
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"Kindness steers no easy course. Attributing it to character, we seldom recognize the secret efforts of a noble heart, whereas we reward really wicked people for the evil they refrain from committing."
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"A wife is property that one acquires by contract, she is transferable, because possession of her requires title; in fact, woman is, so to speak, only man's appendage; consequently, slice, cut, clip her, you have all rights to her."
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"Love which economizes is never true love."
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"To speak of love is to make love."
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"Love is the only passion which suffers neither past nor future."
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"Equality may be the law, but no human power can install it."
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"The man whom fate employs to awaken love in the heart of a young girl is often unaware of his work and therefore leaves it uncompleted."
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"A year at the breast is quite enough; children who are suckled longer are said to grow stupid, and I am all for popular sayings."
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"A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur."
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"The woman who is about to deceive her husband always carefully thinks out how she is going to act, but she is never logical."
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"Once she has committed sin, there is nothing left for the Protestant woman, whereas the Catholic Church, hope of forgiveness makes a woman sublime."
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"Are not poets men who fulfill their hopes prematurely?"
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"A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all."
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"What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?"
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"Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints."
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"To stroll is a science, it is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.... To stroll is to enjoy, it is to assume a mind-set, it is to admire the sublime pictures of unhappiness, of love, of joy, of graceful or grotesque portraits; it is to plunge one's vision to the depths of a thousand existences: young, it is to desire everything; old, it is to live the life of the young, to marry their passions."
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