Quotes

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We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.

Pride and Prejudice
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?

Pride and Prejudice
At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.

Orlando
Clich�s, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

Status Anxiety
It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.

Status Anxiety
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Status Anxiety
You are being taught everything, but you are not being taught to be yourself. This is the ugliest form of society possible, because it makes everybody miserable.

Joy: The Happiness That Comes from Within
Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.

The Zurau Aphorisms (20)
To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
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On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
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