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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
Hope
Poems
Beautiful
Yield
May
Measure
Giving
Despair
Looms
Grief
Stripped
Ambition
Secretly
Gives
Ambitions
Start
Veils

More quotes by Honore de Balzac

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By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.
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Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
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It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
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The love of nature is the only love that does not deceive human hopes.
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Life in clubs is no paltry sign of the times we live in. Here gentlemen gamble with others whom they would not dream of inviting to their homes.
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Necessity is the spur of genius.
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We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.
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Poetry is only born after painful journeys into the vast regions of thought.
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One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species and, in fine, to have invented love.
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Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|tresse jusqu'a' lui mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
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Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
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If we study Nature attentively in its great evolutions as in its minutest works, we cannot fail to recognize the possibility of enchantment - giving to that word its exact significance.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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Religious ecstasy is a madness of thought freed of its bodily bonds, whereas in the ecstasy of love, the forces of twin natures unite, blend and embrace one another.
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It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion it is a joy of every moment.
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Where some one else's welfare is concerned, a young girl becomes as ingenious as a thief. Guileless where she herself is in question, and full of foresight for me,-she is like a heavenly angel forgiving the strange incomprehensible sins of earth.
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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?
Honore de Balzac
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Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
Honore de Balzac