Honore de Balzac Quotes

The young are always in extremes.

I'm a passionate person, to a fault at times.

[Youth] have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations.... They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones; their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning.... All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently.... They love too much, hate too much; they think they know everything: in fact, this is why they overdo everything.

The young may be pure in heart, but they are also high on emotion and short on life experience. Simply put, they are natural philistines.

In your late teens and early twenties, everything is idealism. Everything should just work in black and white. That's good. You need that. I think most revolutions are started by people in their teens and twenties.

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

...I mean, you don't just love people, you must LOVE them with exclamation points.

This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

It is really important that young people find something that they want to do and pursue it with passion. I'm very passionate about filmmaking. It's what I love to do.

We are met today in a general conference. Sometimes, I hear, the people feel, some of them, that perhaps we are not quite as "peppy" as we ought to be. But this is not a Church convention. This is a general conference where we meet for general counsel and advice. It is a place to which we come for the results of the reflective operations of our minds.

Am I nervous? Yeah. Am I scared? Sure. But I do this because I love it.

It’s the same thing. Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’s directed.

I try to excite myself so I stay crazy.

I love the acquaintance of young people; because, in the first place, I do not like to think myself growing old. In the next place, young acquaintances must last longest, if they do last; and then, sir, young men have more virtue than old men; they have more generous sentiments in every respect.

That is like throwing two virgins into a bed. Enthusiasm, passion, and ignorance are not a good combination. Someone is likely to get hurt.

I'm sick of all these young people just boogeying around, wasting their lives, you know.

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

I get inspired with passion, I think. I get inspired by people who are just passionate, and it doesn't matter what they do or what they're passionate about.

youth has everything - everything but experience and tolerance.

I have always been a very passionate person. Some people are born with this fire burning inside to "do," or create, with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and experience, and I am no exception.

If you're young and inexperienced you might accept what people tell you, that everything's going to be fine, it's okay. It's usually other young people saying that, who don't know any better. It's good to have a survival instinct because increasingly, especially in the whole Arab Spring sort of violence, you're mostly with young people who have not experienced what they're doing before.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others need something to get their pilot light lit?

I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.