Oh Arc, I’m similarly inclined. The Balzac quotation is a taunt, baiting me into argument. I often find myself fighting against the cynicism of (bad) experience - which I would guess is the germ of that quotation.
Here are my faves. I have loved all of these for a long time and thought about them countless times!
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(I am a man. Nothing human is foreign to me.)
~ Terence
Respect deities, but do not rely on them.
~ Miyamoto Musashi
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.–‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’–Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. […]
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
This one is more contemporary -
Such energy poured into technical fixes: speed, connectivity etc. So little into social fixes: purpose, community, kindness…
~ Alain de Botton
To me it asks the question: what if all the effort that built the apps on your phone, on your pc, that ceaselessly iterates to create all manner of software applications and endlessly update them - what if even a fraction of that effort was instead directed at building more robust communities and solving social problems? What would the world be like?