"Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist."
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Quote collection
Honore de Balzac quotes (page 8 of 34)
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"We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are."
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"Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence."
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"With monuments as with men, position means everything."
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"Clouds signify the veil of the Most High."
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"To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure."
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"Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons."
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"The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan."
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"Those who spend too fast never grow rich."
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"Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron."
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"The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband."
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"Gratitude is a fool's word; we find it in the dictionary, but it is not in the heart of man."
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"Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink..."
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"The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics."
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"Imaginative, sanguine men will never recognize that in negotiations the most dangerous moment of all is when everything is moving according to their wishes."
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"Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant."
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"Resignation is a daily suicide."
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"But reason always cuts a poor figure beside sentiment; the one being essentially restricted, like everything that is positive, while the other is infinite."
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"Reading brings us unknown friends"
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"Many men are deeply moved by the mere semblance of suffering in a woman; they take the look of pain for a sign of constancy or of love."
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