The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework.

The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.