All men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an honourable bigotry, for the objects which have long continued to please them.

The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.

You throw the ball, and three things can happen. Two of them are bad.

We are the slaves of objects around us, and appear little or important according as these contract or give us room to expand.

Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.

After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him.

Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories-those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.