Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect - George Sand

MEPHISTOPHELES: What dreary, stale employment to keep watch on a philosopher! [...] These logicians are distrustful souls. One works like a spider around their cold brains to catch them in the web of dialectic, but the result is that they kick and catch the devil in threads of their own making. They use chicanery to resist the master who taught it to them! This one uses demonstrative reason to arrive at faith, and what ruins others saves him from my claws. You are a mystical pedant who gives me more pain than did your ancestor, Faust. [...] Behold, philosophers who want at one and the same time to understand and to feel. If we let them get away with it, man will slip between our fingers quickly enough. Hola, my masters! Believe and be absurd, we agree to that; but don’t complicate it by trying both to believe and to be wise.

can the title of Donna Bustamente make me any happier?” “It would put you out of reach of the insolent disdain of society.” “Society!” said Juliette; “you mean your friends. What is society? I have never known. I have passed through life and made the tour of the globe, but have never been able to discover what you call society.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.