Arthur Schopenhauer on Rank

“Compared with genuine personal advantages, such as a great mind or a great heart, all the privileges of rank, birth, even royal birth, wealth, and so on, are as kings on the stage to kings in real life.”

“What a man is by himself, what accompanies him into solitude, and what no one can give to him or take from him is obviously more essential to him than everything he possesses, or even what he may be in the eyes of others.”

“While Nature sets very wide differences between man and man in respect both of morality and of intellect, society disregards and effaces them; or, rather, it sets up artificial differences in their stead,—gradations of rank and position, which are very often diametrically opposed to those which Nature establishes. The result of this arrangement is to elevate those whom Nature has placed low, and to depress the few who stand high. These latter, then, usually withdraw from society, where, as soon as it is at all numerous, vulgarity reigns supreme.”