Where violence reigns, reason is weak.

Society ... is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later -- this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!

It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.

Society is divided into two classes, the shearers and the shorn.

Life is a malady in which sleep soothes us every sixteen hours; it is a palliation; death is the remedy.

Contemptuous people are sure to be contemptible.

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before.