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Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

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
Action
Admirers
Doe
Directs
Nothing
Admirer
Done
Smiles
Men
Invent
Modest
Says
Savant
Force
Savants

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The best painters, as they progress in reputation and towards perfection, are found to dispense more and more with the technique of the art, for simpler methods. Simplicity never fails to charm.
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Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.
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Today nobility is gone: there is only a peerage.
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The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
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Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshnessof a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty.
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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.
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Le coeur d'une me' re est un ab|me au fond duquel se trouve toujours un pardon. A mother'sheart isanabyss atthebottomof whichthere is always forgiveness.
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Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.
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Conventions are often more cruel than the law.
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Reproach is usually honest, which is more than can be said of praise.
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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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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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All genuinely noble women prefer truth to falsehood. As the Russians with their Czar, they are unwilling to see their idol degraded they want to be proud of the domination they accept.
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Admiration bestowed upon any one but ourselves is always tedious.
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Ah! the soft starlight of virgin eyes.
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Even beauty cannot always palliate eccentricity.
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The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.
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Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
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The woman you buy takes a great deal of money. The woman who gives herself to you takes all your money.
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Suicide, moreover, was at the time in vogue in Paris: what more suitable key to the mystery of life for a skeptical society?
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