“We are advised and led along by second-rate moralists who only know how to work themselves into a delirium and pass their illness onto others.”
The Eloquence of Our Passions
Alain On Happiness (1928)
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Alain 35
French philosopher 1868–1951Related quotes

Source: My Double Life (1907), Ch. 28 <!-- p. 324 -->
Context: Those who know the joys and miseries of celebrity when they have passed the age of forty know how to defend themselves. They are at the beginning of a series of small worries, thunderbolts hidden under flowers, but they know how to hold in check that monster advertisement. It is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public when it is vomiting its black gall. But those who are caught in the clutches of celebrity at the age of twenty two know nothing.

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1948/jan/26/french-franc-devaluation#column_672 in the House of Commons (26 January 1948)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 1: In Praise of Idleness

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 2"<!-- 255 -->
Source: The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

War with Honour http://books.google.com/books?id=QmQDAAAAMAAJ&q="I+wrote+somewhere+once+that+the+third+rate+mind+was+only+happy+when+it+was+thinking+with+the+majority+the+second+rate+mind+was+only+happy+when+it+was+with+the+minority+and+a+first+rate+mind+was+only+happy+when+it+was+thinking", Macmillan War Pamphlets, Issue 2 (1940).