...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.
It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.
Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.