Honore de Balzac Quotes

When you're a confused 19-year-old filled with questions you can't even articulate and a kind of black rage that feeds at your heart from the moment you wake up in the morning, and you discover Marcus Aurelius' 'The Meditations,' that changes your life.

It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you're catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts won't satisfy. Isn't overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent. And isn't discontent the lever of change?

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time.

If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...?

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It's a creator of inwardness.

A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach . . .

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

I wouldn't like to say that I'm absolutely God conscious. It's like everybody else. We're battling with the forces that are pulling us upwards and downwards at the same time. But basically we all want love, that's what I feel.

My life is my statement and I try to be true to myself and thusly to other people. Whatever my failings are, they are human and I try to perfect it each day.

Everyone has a self-destructive nature in them. It's whether you feed it or not. You don't have to be a pop star to feel connected to destruction or self-destruction. But self-destruction is self-obsession, and self-obsession is not really possible if you're engaged in raising children. And if you have a spiritual life, you're constantly being asked to see yourself as one small fragment in the bigger picture.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

You have to see through one's faults before you see their need.

Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.

Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

I have no idea whether I am completely sane. I don't think anybody is. I see the world through my eyes. It's sometimes a strange world. I hope I don't hurt people. You hope not to hurt yourself too much, either. Maybe that's the definition of keeping yourself in check?

No truly conscious human being sabotages himself - it's impossible, because it's contrary to Nature.

There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.

We're all flawed human beings and we all have a cauldron of psychosis which we have to unravel as we grow older and find the way we fit in to live our lives as best as possible.

I know little about nature and hardly anything about men.

First you must learn to control your self. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes.

We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves.

In fact, a person always finds when he begins to practice meditation that all sorts of problems are brought out. Any hidden aspects of your personality are brought out into the open, for the simple reason that for the first time you are allowing yourself to see your state of mind as it is.

Over time you learn to know a bit more about yourself - you develop a certain amount of self-insight and self-awareness, and you know what you can absorb, and what you cannot; what gets to you and what doesn't. And I observe a lot. I see a lot around me. And over time you also get to understand the nature of man and the environments you are dealing with, and you can't always allow emotions and temper to flare up because you're displeased with something, or you want to change it.