People who have realized that this is a dream imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, ...not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is... the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand ... borders upon insanity and absurdity--or at least is reminiscent of ...childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustome...d to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case" in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but... the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A generation which has passed through the shop has absorbed standards and ambitions which are not of those of spaciousness, and ca...nnot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally have in view the greatest possible benefit, profit and that end of the stuff that will make the best show.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all th...e fences, within which she is held captive!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Liberalism, austere in political trifles, has learned ever more artfully to unite a constant protest against the government with a... constant submission to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning..., theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »