The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

Give me today, for once, the worst throw of your dice, destiny. Today I transmute everything into gold.

There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.

[Heraclitus] did not require humans or their sort of knowledge, since everything into which one may inquire he despises [as being] in contrast [to his own] inward-turning wisdom. [To him] all learning from others is a sign of nonwisdom, because the wise man focuses his vision on his own intelligence.

Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.