The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life.

In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief.

By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.

Fashion is the playing area for individuals that lack interior autonomy and need more support points, but who nonetheless feel the need to stand out, to be paid attention to and be considered apart from the rest Fashion elevates the insignificant by making it in the representative of a totality, the particular incarnation of a common spirit. Its function is to make possible the kind of social obedience which is at the same time individual differentiation It is the mixing of submission and the feeling of domination that is in action here.

Every relationship between persons causes a picture of each to take form in the mind of the other, and this picture evidently is in reciprocal relationship with that personal relationship.

Gratitude, as it were, is the moral memory of mankind. In this respect, it differs from faithfulness by being more practical and impulsive: although it may remain, of course, something purely internal, it may yet engender new actions. It is an ideal bridge which the soul comes across again and again, so to speak, and which, upon provocations too slight to throw a new bridge to the other person, it uses to come closer to him.