Quote

It is not hope but despair that gives us the measure of our ambitions. We may yield secretly to beautiful poems of hope but grief looms start and stripped of all veils.

Honore de Balzac

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Honore de Balzac
Age: 52 †
Born: 1799
Born: May 20
Died: 1851
Died: August 19
Art Critic
Dramaturge
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Tours
France
Balzac
Horace de Saint- Aubin
Onoreh deh Balzaḳ
Lord R'Hoone
Ônôrē de Balzaq
Jeune ceélibataire
Onore de Balzak
Honorato De Balzac
H. Balzak
Honoreé De Balzac
H. Balzac
Horace de S.- Aubin
Honoriusz Balzac
Un Jeune ceélibataire
Lord O'Rhoone
Ūnūrīh dī Balzāk
R'Hoone
Onore de Bal'zak
Hônôrê đơ Banzăc
Honore de Balzak
de. Balzac
May
Measure
Giving
Despair
Looms
Grief
Stripped
Ambition
Secretly
Gives
Ambitions
Start
Veils
Hope
Poems
Beautiful
Yield

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When chaste people need body or mind to resort to action or thought, they find steel in their muscles or knowledge in their intelligence. Theirs the diabolic vigor or the black magic of will power.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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With monuments as with men, position means everything.
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The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
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At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist there can only be promise of the coming woman.
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When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.
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Marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.
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Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.
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A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!
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Modern society includes three types of men who can never think very highly of the world--the priest, the physician, and the attorney-at-law. They all wear black, too, for are they not in mourning for every virtue and every illusion?
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Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
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Your women of fashion ceases to be a woman. She is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex on the brain.
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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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Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.
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It would be curious to know what leads a man to become a stationer rather than a baker, when he is no longer compelled, as among the Egyptians, to succeed to his father's craft.
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Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
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The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.
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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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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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A sacrament by virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the other.
Honore de Balzac