"Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 28 of 34)
668 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius."
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"Economized love is never real love."
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"Love may be the fairest gem which Society has filched from Nature; but what is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood? A smile has dried my tears."
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"The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings."
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"Women, perhaps even require a little hypocrisy."
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"Sects differ more in name than tenets."
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"A vocation is born to us all; happily most of us meet promptly our twin,--occupation."
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"Remorse is impotence, impotence which sins again. Repentance alone is powerful; it ends all."
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"Let nothing dupe you! Such is the horrible maxim that acts as a solvent upon every noble feeling man experiences."
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"Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two."
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"Our souls possess the unknown power of extending as well as contracting space."
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"Like evil, sublimity is also contagious."
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"Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly."
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"All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things."
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"Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain."
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"Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live."
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"The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared."
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"Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, the obscurer side of religion."
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"Glory is the sunshine of the dead"
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