The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world — impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not — to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas.
Charles Baudelaire
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
James Baldwin
What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees.
Marcus Aurelius
Society is to the individual what the sun and showers are to the seed. It develops him, expands him, unfolds him, calls him out of himself. Other men are his opportunity. Each one is a match which ignites some new tinder in him unignitible by any previous match. Without these the sparks of individuality would sleep in him forever.
Orison Sweet Marden
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.
Marcel Proust
What passed for society was a loud, giddy whirl of thieves and pretentious hustlers, a dull sideshow full of quacks and clowns and philistines with gimp mentalities.
Hunter S. Thompson
We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.
George Bernard Shaw
We do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.
Alan Watts
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Society is inside of man and man is inside society, and you cannot even create a truthfully drawn psychological entity on the stage until you understand his social relations and their power to make him what he is and to prevent him from being what he is not. The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish.
Arthur Miller
The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.
Vince Lombardi
The social body persists although the component cells may change.
Aldous Huxley
The principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights, which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature.
William Blackstone
Society is a hospital of incurables.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
Mahatma Gandhi
Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
Henry David Thoreau
Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.
Edmund Burke
Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.
Henry David Thoreau
Society is now one polish’d horde,
Form’d of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.
Lord Byron
No one would speak much in society if he were aware how often we misunderstand others.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
Oscar Wilde
Leave the bustle and tumult of society to those who have not talents to occupy themselves without them.
Thomas Jefferson
No social stability without individual stability.
Aldous Huxley
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
Man delights in society far more than do bees or herds.
Aristotle
Society is no comfort
To one not sociable.
William Shakespeare
Have any other quotes about society you’d add to the collection? Which is your favorite? Let me know in the comments.
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