All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it

What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.