"Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient."

“In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all...”

“Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything.”

“For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others.”

“A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know.”

“Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine has too many dogmas to easily believe in a new truth ; too many sympathies and antipathies for him to come to love something unfamiliar; too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion .”