Weakness of character or lack of ideas, in a word all that can withhold us from living a solitary life, are things that preserve many a man from misanthropy.
“Why Madame de L. should be so anxious for me to visit her,” said a friend to me, “I do not know, for when some time has elapsed without my going I despise her less.” The same might be said of the world in general.
I asked M. N—— why he had ceased to go into society. “Because,” he replied, “I no longer love the women and I know the men.”
Society, what people call the world, is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later—this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity!
What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author’s ideas and those of the public.