"No frozen-hearted woman ever I laid eyes on but has made duty her religion."
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Honore de Balzac quotes (page 32 of 34)
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"A woman in the depths of despair proves so persuasive that she wrenches the forgiveness lurking deep in the heart of her lover. This is all the more true when that woman is young, pretty, and so decollete as to emerge from the neck of her gown in the costume of Eve."
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"In painting, you can suddenly come upon something so huge that no-one can deal with it."
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"I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings."
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"You're a fine fastidious young man, as proud as a lion, as gentle as a girl. You'd make a good catch for the devil."
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"Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work."
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"Marriage is a fight to the death. Before contracting it, the two parties concerned implore the benediction of Heaven because to promise to love each other forever is the rashest of enterprises."
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"For young people always begin by loving exaggeration, that infirmity of noble minds."
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"If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down."
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"Love based upon money and vanity forms the most stubborn of passions."
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"Priests, magistrates and ladies never quite take off their gowns."
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"Love endows us with a sort of personal religion; we respect another live within ourselves."
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"No hawk swooping down upon his prey, no stag improvising new detours by which to trick the huntsman, no dog scenting game from afar is comparable in speed to the celerity of a salesman when he gets wind a deal, to his skill in tripping up or forestalling a rival, and to the art with which he sniffs out and discovers a possible sale."
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"When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death."
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"When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse."
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"The wounds of self-love turn incurable when the oxide of self-love gets into them."
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"Show me the woman, however loyal, who does not seek to rouse desire."
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"Self-love is as protective as the Deity; Disenchantment is as perspicacious as a surgeon; Experience is as provident as a mother. Such are the theologic virtues of marriage."
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"Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things."
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"Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues."
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