It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur.

Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain.

More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.

Men do not know how to appreciate or measure luck except that of others. Their own never.

The belief that men don’t need help is part of the problem.

The majority of men ... never turn their attention from the outside world to examine themselves. ... They go through life drawn hither and thither by outside happenings, with scarcely any originality, or without any more control of their direction than have the leaves which are whirled about by the autumn wind.

Human praise and human blame are mostly valueless, because men know not the whole which they praise or blame.

men do not suspect faults which they do not commit

A person does not choose a vocation. A vocation is a calling.

Gentlemen don’t earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don’t do anything.

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

Many much-learned men have no intelligence.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.