A Quote by Honore de Balzac

Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors. — © Honore de Balzac
Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.
There is no doubt about it: we are judged by our language as much as (perhaps more than) we are judged by our appearance, our choice of associates, our behavior. Language communicates so much more than ideas; it reveals our intelligence, our knowledge of a topic, our creativity, our ability to think, our self-confidence, et cetera.
I believe that in judging our actions we are more severe than professional judges. We judge not only our actions, but our thoughts, our intentions, our secret curses, our hidden hate.
Music speaks of Platonic truth - the ideal river rather than the polluted reality, love as we dream it rather than we experience it, grief noble and uplifting rather than our distracted weeping. It is necessary to our survival and our sanity.
I’ve seen how important this concept is in business. To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit. We try to follow that at salesforce.com, where we give 1% of our equity, 1% of our profits, and 1% of our employees’ time to the community. By integrating philanthropy into our business model our employees feel that they do much more than just work at our company. By sharing a common and important mission, we are united and focused, and have found a secret weapon that ensures we always win.
The motives to actions and the inward turns of mind seem in our opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves; and much rather would we choose that our reader should clearly understand what our principal actors think than what they do.
The secret of our lost mode of prayer is to shift our perspective of life by feeling that the miracle has already happened and our prayers have been answered. Now we have the opportunity to bring this wisdom into our lives as prayers of gratitude for what already exists, rather than asking for our prayers to be answered.
We have to use our discontentment to engage rather than disengage - our hope has to be more powerful than our cynicism.
When we stop to count our blessings rather than focusing on our predicament, our attitude will be able to help us cope with our situation more productively.
My third maxim was to try always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to accustom myself to believing that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts, so that after we have done our best regarding things external to us, everything in which we do not succeed is for us absolutely impossible.
It is where we embrace our questions. . . . Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?
The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.
My plea therefore is this: Let us get our instruments tightly strung and our melodies sweetly sung. Let us not die with our music still in us. Let us rather use this precious mortal probation to move confidently and gloriously upward toward the eternal life which God our Father gives to those who keep his commandments.
Our cause is just. Our union is perfect. ... With hearts fortified ... we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare that... we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverence, employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live slaves.
More and more we try to effect an adaptation to life by means of external gadgets, and attempt to solve our problems by conscious thinking rather than unconscious 'know-how'. This is much less to our advantage than we like to suppose.
Power is a central issue in social and personal transformation. Our sources and uses of power set our boundaries, give form to our relationships, even determine how much we let ourselves liberate and express aspects of the self. More than party registration, more than our purported philosophy or ideology, personal power defines our politics.
Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words.
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