Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize y… - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect — you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.

Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.