With few ambitions, most people allowed efficient machines to perform everyday tasks for them. Gradually, humans ceased to think, or dream... or truly live.

For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.

Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already.

Everyone was good at talking about day-to-day events, but no one ever looked at what motivated them.

The world cares little about what a man knows;it cares more about what a man is able to do.

They do everything in their power to make fortune favor them in this life, but nevertheless they think so little of it, in relation to eternity, that they view the events of the world as we do those of a play.

Like many isolated people, they were wrapped up in themselves and not too interested in the world outside.

I would say for a great percentage of people, all they do is repeat their past. They really don't have a future at all.

Just imagine the silence in the world, if people talked only what they knew

Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety; it shows itself in acts rather than words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations.

When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivial objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.

Thinking little at all about nothing in particular.

It was a lonely life to lead, for I had nothing to think of, having been made such a little while before.

[...] people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.