It's a question of prudence. Nobody has a high opinion of fishwives but who would dare offend them while walking through the fish market.

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.

It is said of a lonely man that he does not appreciate the life of society. This is like saying he hates hiking because he dislikes walking in thick forest on a dark night.

The poor are the blacks of Europe.

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!

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.