Honore de Balzac Quotes

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.

As someone who is obsessed with fashion, I personally own non-vegan materials and am very open about that. I don't think it's right to pretend to be someone you're not to get sales. People know me on a real level because of how open I am in my videos. It was a simple choice: I didn't want to exclude anyone, that wasn't fair. I wanted EVERY customer to be able to wear my art. And it's morally right. End of story.

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake.

Man is born with uprightness. If one loses it, he will be lucky if he escapes with his life.

In the end a lie is a lie.

The real test of any church or religion is the kind of men it makes.

Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.

Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world.

Things rarely happen for a single reason. Even the cleverest and most skilled manipulators recognize that their real art lies in making use of that which they cannot predict.

Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

Conscience warns us not to sink our cleats too deeply in mortal turf, which is so dangerously artificial.

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

I would like the whole world to be full with authentic art, throbbing with it, living with it, because that is the only way: through authentic art, real art, you transcend it. If the music is real, soon you will move into meditation, because the music will only give you a little glimpse of meditation, nothing more.

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.

Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.

The same principle that forbids me to lie does not allow me to tell the truth.

Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.

Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the ways of different arts one by one.

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.