The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.

The weakness of their reasoning faculty also explains why women show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men;... and why, on the contrary, they are inferior to men as regards justice, and less honourable and conscientious.

Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.

The problem with Germans is that they look in the clouds for what lies at their feet.

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.