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![Book cover for Madame Bovary (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #18]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453593918l/28683539._SX98_.jpg "Madame Bovary (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #18]")
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Unfortunately, however, cultural questions have little interest for practical men, who regard money and power as the proper ends for nations as for individuals.
“Let all that perish! Let us set aside these vain and empty ambitions. Let us concentrate ourselves exclusively on the investigation of the truth. Life is a misery, death is uncertain. It may suddenly carry us off. In what state shall we depart this life? Where are we to learn the things we have neglected here? And must we not rather pay for this negligence with punishments? What if death itself will cut off and end all anxiety by eliminating the mind?”
― Confessions
― Confessions
“Oh how corrupted is the man to whom a dog and a horse are better than the soul! Oh how deformed is he to whom a shoe, whatever its worth, is more beautiful than the soul! Nothing is truly good or beautiful in the house of that man where all things seem good and beautiful before himself, that is before the soul. If some Cynic philosopher were to enter the sanctuary of that man, in all its adornment, and were compelled by some necessity to spit, certainly he should spit in his face, for clearly he would see each single thing therein clean and adorned, in preference to the man himself.”
― Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters
― Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters
“Society in general, simply by its effect on men's minds, undoubtedly has all that is required to arouse the sensation of the divine. A society is to its members what a god is to its faithful. A god is first of all a being that man conceives of as superior to himself in some respects and one on whom he believes he depends.”
― The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
― The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
“I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend. Although I wanted it to be otherwise, I was more unwilling to lose my misery than him, and I do not know if I would have given up my life for him as the story reports of Orestes and Pylades: if it is not fiction, they were willing to die for each other together, because it was worse than death to them not to be living together. But in me there had emerged a very strange feeling which was the opposite of theirs. I found myself heavily weighed down by a sense of being tired of living and scared of dying.”
― Confessions
― Confessions
“The whole social world seems populated with forces that in reality exist only in our minds. We know what the flag is for the soldier, but in itself it is only a bit of cloth. Human blood is only an organic liquid, yet even today we cannot see it flow without experiencing an acute emotion that its physicochemical properties cannot explain. From a physical point of view, man is nothing but a system of cells, and from the mental point of view, a system of representations. From both points of view, he differs from the animal only in degree. And yet society conceives him and requires that we conceive him as being endowed with a sui generis character that insulates and shields him from all reckless infringement - in other words, that imposes respect.”
― The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
― The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
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