"Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide."
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Honore de Balzac quotes (page 6 of 34)
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"This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder."
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"Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue."
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"To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him."
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"Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives."
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"The first thing necessary to win the heart of a woman is opportunity."
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"Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true."
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"If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool's notion of history."
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"Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy."
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"Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!"
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"Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside."
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"Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it."
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"In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman."
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"Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers."
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"To say to a rich man: You are poor! is to tell the Archbishop of Granada that his sermons are worthless."
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"Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones."
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"Clouds symbolize the veils that shroud God."
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"There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events."
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"Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life."
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"Fools gain greater advantages through their weakness than intelligent men through their strength. We watch a great man struggling against fate and we do not lift a finger to help him. But we patronize a grocer who is headed for bankruptcy."
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