“Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: to accept this event with humility; to treat this person as he should be treated; to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in.”

“Even if the sacrifices which are made to duty and virtue are painful to make, they are well repaid by the sweet recollections which they leave at the bottom of the heart.”

You believe in a crystal palace, eternally indestructible; a palace, that is, at which you could never stick out your tongue furtively, or gesture rudely from inside your pocket. Well, maybe I am afraid of this building exactly because it is crystal and eternally indestructible and that it will be impossible to stick out my tongue at it, even furtively... Laugh as you will. I can take any amount of mockery but still I won’t say that I am satiated when I am hungry; still I know that I won’t settle for a compromise, for a persistent, recurring zero, just because it exists according to the laws of nature and exists in reality.

“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results.”

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

“There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself.”

“I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can be so; but it is my opinion that he who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble in order to maintain their respect is as culpable as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.”