He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.

Convictions are prisons.

Some people throw a bit of their personality after their bad arguments, as if that might straighten their paths and turn them into right and good arguments-just as a man in a bowling alley, after he has let go of the ball, still tries to direct it with gestures.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and nowand again they notice it.

Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim toall his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functionsextends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.

The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.