Quotes About Society

Thus the Verdurins gave their dinners (soon, after the death of M. Verdurin, Mme Verdurin alone) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures, without realising that the Germans — immobilised, it is true, by a bleeding barrier which was always being renewed — were at an hour's automobile drive from Paris.

social, and even individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch.

And while Bloch's eye gleamed as he thought of what the conversation of these marvellous people must have been, I was thinking that I had exaggerated my pleasure in their society, having never got any until I was alone and could differentiate them in my imagination. Did Bloch realise this?

in that blinding light of the beach by which social distinctions are altered,

every social class has its own pathology...

it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe.

For me high society is only a means to an end. It offers vulgar but invincible weapons, and if I want to be loved someday, I have to possess them.

He had, indeed, one of the advantages which men who have lived and moved in society enjoy over those, however intelligent, who have not, namely that they no longer see it transfigured by the longing or repulsion which it inspires, but regard it as of no importance.

which there was already installed a lady with a massive face, old and ugly, with a masculine expression, very much in her Sunday best, who was reading the Revue des Deux Mondes. Notwithstanding her commonness, she was eclectic in her tastes, and I found amusement in asking myself to what social category she could belong; I at once concluded that she must be the manager of some large brothel, a procuress on holiday. Her face, her manner, proclaimed the fact aloud.

Choderlos de Laclos,

In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen and D'Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind's eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once 'put in' the people he meets

As it had been with Dreyfusism, so it was with the marriage of Saint-Loup and Odette's daughter, a marriage people protested against at first. Now that people met everyone they knew at the Saint-Loups', Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette herself, people would have gone there just the same and would have agreed with Gilberte in condemning undigested moral novelties like a dowager-duchess.

Since railways came into existence, the necessity of not missing the train has taught us to take account of minutes whereas among the ancient Romans, who not only had a more cursory science of astronomy but led less hurried lives, the notion not of minutes but even of fixed hours barely existed.

chaque classe sociale a sa pathologie)

As pessoas mundanas estão de tal modo acostumadas a que as procurem que quem lhes foge parece-lhes uma fênix e domina-lhes por inteiro o pensamento.

Lastly, would not society become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic?

It was the time when well-bred people observed the rule of affability and what was called the rule of the three adjectives.

For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.

that half of the human race in whom the curiosity the other half feels about the people it does not know is replaced by an interest in the people it does.

All the products of one period resemble one another; the artists who illustrate the poetry of their generation are the same artists who are employed by the big financial houses.

Every morning you slunk out of our house after breakfast, leaving behind the books and the smell of coffee....and like a spy going deep undercover into enemy territory, you entered a world that was a terrible inversion of everything I had taught you to value: a world shaped by toughness, boastful ignorance, firm gender stereotypes, underachievement, and the threat of violence.

La capacidad de observar – ni siquiera de analizar – está muy mermada hoy en día, cuando todos quieren ser protagonistas.