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Acceptance
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Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
-Honore de Balzac
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Action(s)
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Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
-Honore de Balzac
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Art
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If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
-Honore de Balzac
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The man who can but sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in painting to every memory, in music to every heart! --this is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every moment to work in obedience to the mind.
-Honore de Balzac, Cousin Bette
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Career, Vocation
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Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
-Honore de Balzac
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Coffee (or Tea)
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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...
-Honore de Balzac
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Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
-Honore de Balzac, Treatise on Modern Stimulants
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Crime
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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.
paraphrased as: Behind every great fortune there is a crime
-Honore de Balzac, Father Goriot
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Eating
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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.
-Honore de Balzac
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Emotions
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All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
-Honore de Balzac
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Equality
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Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
-Honore de Balzac
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Exaggeration
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We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
-Honore de Balzac
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Fools, Foolishness
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Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
-Honore de Balzac
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Fortune
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Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
-Honore de Balzac
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Friends
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Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
-Honore de Balzac
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Government
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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-Honore de Balzac
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Hate
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Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
-Honore de Balzac
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Humility
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Modesty is the conscience of the body.
-Honore de Balzac
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Imitation
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You may imitate, but never counterfeit.
-Honore de Balzac
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Inheritance
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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.
-Honore de Balzac
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Investment
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I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
-Honore de Balzac
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Laughter
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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
-Honore de Balzac
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Love
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The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
-Honore de Balzac
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Manners
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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
-Honore de Balzac
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Marriage
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A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
-Honore de Balzac
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Books by and about Honore de Balzac