If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.

To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.

To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.

I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.

Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.

You can do what you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing.