Honore de Balzac Quotes

My motto is, 'What's the hurry?' I'm trying to get it across to the modern world that we need to sit around and think a little bit more.

To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.

One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.

To know, to think, to dream. That is everything.

If you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.

Nothing. My father is very good at doing nothing. He calls it thinking.

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

We have everything we need, in fact, except the most important thing of all — time to think and the habit of thought.

Every thought is an afterthought.

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

He had been (Thinking? Praying?) It was all the same thing.

Time given to thought is the greatest time saver of all.

Action isn’t my forte. I’m an expert on contemplation and mild regret.

the contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation

Saying that I've THOUGHT about it doesn't mean that I'm DOING it.

Contemplation is necessary to generate an object, but action must propagate it.

You spend your time thinking about that and you get lost in reflection.

Whatever sentence will bear to be read twice, we may be sure was thought twice.

I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.

You might want to put this in the back of your craw and think about it.

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas.