I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.

There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.

Woman is essentially unpeaceful, like the cat, however well she may have trained herself to present an appearance of peace.

If we have injured someone, giving him the opportunity to make a joke about us is often enough to provide him personal satisfaction, or even to win his good will.

Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.

Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth.