Honore de Balzac Quotes

My soul is dead.

Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness.

For tis not in mere death that men die most.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives - the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or the glory of other men in yourself.

I was spiritually bankrupt, and when that happens, it's like a spiritual cancer afflicts you.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

I'm so close to Heaven, this Hell cannot be mine.

I was obsessed with not knowing what happened after you were dead. And I sat or kneeled for a whole day with my head against the wall, trying to figure it out. But I couldn't, and I just said, 'Okay.' And then it was nothingness.

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.

The first step to eternal life is you have to die.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

Die before you die and find that there is no death.

Despair puts the last touch not only to our misery but also to our weakness.

I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

Life is the saddest thing there is, next to death.

Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.

Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

I did not weep, and it pained me that i could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like--free at last!

I remember, when I have preached at different times in the country, and sometimes here, that my whole soul has agonized over men, every nerve of my body has been strained and I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears, if I could but win souls

Only in unawareness you are mortal. In awareness you are immortal.

My joy is death- Death, at whose name I oft have been afeard, Because I wish'd this world's eternity.

Wait. You don't understand. I just wanted it to stop. Wanted the hurting to stop." I smoothed a bloodied lock of hair from her eyes and felt very tired as I said, "The only people who never hurt are dead." The light died out of her eyes, her breath slowing. She whispered, barely audible, "I don't understand." I answered, "I don't either." A tear slid from her eye and mixed with the blood. Then she died.