"My loathing for being disdained, which I thought I could control till the moment of my death, now obliges me to speak. Gentlemen, I do not have the honor of belonging to your class. What you see in me is a peasant, in revolt against the barrenness of his fate."

"Only a fool," he (Julien) said to himself, "gets angry at others. A stone falls because it's heavy. Am I going to be forever a child? When will I acquire the good habit of giving these people my soul, only and exactly to the extent they pay me for it? If I want to be valued by them, as well as by myself, it must be by demonstrating to them that my poverty is doing business with their wealth, and yet that my heart is a thousand leagues distant from their insolence, set in a sphere too high to be affected by their petty displays of either disdain or approval."