He who takes people for smart pays an expensive lesson.

Plato calls complacency the companion of loneliness.

Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.

Progress will always have as its recourse to exaggerate what it cannot surpass.

The verdict on Prince Metternich will soon be out: An excellent diplomat and a bad politician.

Swear words and profanities are mere abbreviations of speech, similar to the abbreviations in writing.

As far as the arts and the sciences are concerned, the German mind appreciates most highly that which it does not understand of the latter, and that which it does not enjoy of the former.