On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.

In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events.

Modern culture is constantly growing more objective. Its tissues grow more and more out of impersonal energies, and absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual.

Discretion is nothing other than the sense of justice with respect to the sphere of the intimate contents of life.

Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.

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.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.