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Honore de Balzac Quotes - Page 11

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Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.

Carelessness in dressing is moral suicide.

Honore de Balzac
Suicide, Moral, Dressings

Passion is born deaf and dumb.

Honore de Balzac
Passion, Dumb, Deaf

At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.

Honore de Balzac
Promise, Fifteen, Talent

Old maids claw as cats do. They not only inflict wounds but experience pleasure in doing so. Nor will they fail to remind their victims of the blood drawn.

Honore de Balzac
Cat, Blood, Maids

What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?

Honore de Balzac
Powerful, Government, Order

Beauty is the greatest of human powers. Any power without counterbalance or control becomes autocratic and leads to abuse and to folly. Despotism in a government is insanity; in woman, fantasy.

Honore de Balzac
Beauty, Power, Government

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Honore de Balzac
Art, Eye, Hands

The sanctity of womanhood is incompatible with social liberty and social claims; and for a woman emancipation means corruption.

Honore de Balzac
Women, Mean, Liberty
Honore de Balzac (2011). “A Woman at Thirty”, p.121, The Floating Press

The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.

Honore de Balzac
Loss, Secret, Crime
Honore de Balzac (2015). “Father Goriot”, p.108, Library of Alexandria

Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.

Honore de Balzac
Weed, Marijuana, Degrees

A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.

Honore de Balzac
Atheist, Atheism
"Le catéchisme social" by Honore de Balzac, Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, (p. 137), 1933.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

Honore de Balzac
Writing, Color, Political

Virtue is always too much of a piece and too ignorant of those shades of feeling and of temperament that enable us to squint when we are placed in a false position.

Honore de Balzac
Feelings, Ignorant, Pieces

Emulation is not rivalry. Emulation is the child of ambition; rivalry is the unlovable daughter of envy.

Honore de Balzac
Daughter, Children, Ambition

When law becomes despotic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa.

Honore de Balzac
Law, Vices, Literature
Honore de Balzac (2011). “The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin”, p.56, The Floating Press

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.

Honore de Balzac
Women, Fall, Heart

Any man, however blase or depraved, finds his love kindled anew when he sees himself threatened by a rival.

Honore de Balzac
Love, Men, Rivals

The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.

Honore de Balzac
Hate, Men, Hatred

All happiness depends on courage and work.

Honore de Balzac
Life, Happiness, Courage

Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.

Honore de Balzac
Ugly, Sin, Ugliness

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

Honore de Balzac
Exaggeration Is, Literature, Bad Grades

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.

Honore de Balzac
Hypocrisy, Manners, Nations
Honore de Balzac (2014). “Analytical Studies: Physiology of Marriage and Petty Troubles of Married Life”, p.63, The Floating Press

What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.

Honore de Balzac
May, Fantasy, Dusk

A deist is an atheist with an eye cocked for the off-chance of some advantage.

Honore de Balzac
Atheist, Eye, Chance

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

Honore de Balzac
Love Is, Imagination, Novelists

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