It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

The happy man only feels at ease because the unhappy bear their burden in silence. Without this silence, happiness would be impossible.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.