The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.

Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.

Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.

I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.