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Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

Honore de Balzac

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Chivalry Love Oneself Service Wisdom
Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman’s destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Destiny Live Maid Old Requirement Woman
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Control Giant Operation
Women see everything or nothing according to the inclination of their hearts. Love is their sole light.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Heart Light Love See Woman
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

Appetite Hungry Love Man Necessary Sex
Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Bond Greatness Relationship Sick Yourself
Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Event Person Result
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

Beginning Coffee Fall Ideas Ink Paper Smile
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Art Humanity Passion Religion Romance Universal Wasted
The more you judge, the less you love.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Judge Love Yourself
One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Believe Immortal Marriage Oneself Soul
A man is a poor creature compared to a woman.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Compare Creature Man Poor Woman
Hatred like love feeds on the merest trifles. Everything adds to it. Just as the being we love can do no wrong, so the one we hate can do no right.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Food Hate Love Right Wrong
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals – that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Forever Greatness Ideal Live Praise Presence World
All human power is a compound of time and patience.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Compound Human Patience Power Time
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Hard Power Reveal Strike True
Life is simply what out feelings do to us.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Feeling Life Ourselves Simplicity
The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Defeat Orphan Parents Victory
Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Divine Introduction Life Mom Poverty World Youth
No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Discover Friendship Himself Man Way Wife
Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Art Artist Feeling Heart Herself Love Touch Word
The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Original Resistance Time Woman
No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Dare Love Motive Natural Woman
Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Forget Life
A mother who is really a mother is never free.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Children Freedom Mom
If we all said to people’s faces what we say behind one another’s backs, society would be impossible.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Face Impossible People Society
Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.
HONORE DE BALZAC

Beginning Poverty

Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

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Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.

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