Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

I do my intellectual work inside myself, and once I am with my fellow creatures it is more or less a matter of indifference to me whether or not they are intelligent as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.

There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.