"The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one."
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Honore de Balzac quotes (page 3 of 34)
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"Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own."
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"According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on."
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"Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them."
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"A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way."
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"One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul."
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"All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all."
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"Like hunger, physical love is a necessity. But man's appetite for amour is never so regular or so sustained as his appetite for the delights of the table."
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"In Paris, the greatest expression of personal satisfaction known to man is the smirk on the face of a male, highly pleased with himself as he leaves the boudoir of a lady."
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"The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute."
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"Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face."
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"A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity."
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"If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent."
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"Sometimes at the best moments a single word or a look is enough.'"
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"Love is the poetry of the senses."
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"Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies."
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"Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity."
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"Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."
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"The glutton is much more than an animal and much less than a man."
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"For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth."
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