As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.

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.

Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

The graceful flowers of innocence are more valuable than the laurel crown of fame.

If someone took the finest marble and knew how to shape it artfully: Prometheus' material was lowly clay, but his statues walked.

You ardently strive for freedom, and I do wish you were free--but, rather than for your sake, so that government won't be.

Plato calls complacency the companion of loneliness.