There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved

Our sense of the tragic waxes and wanes with our sensuality.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

The same relation exists between merchant and pirate, who for a long period are one and the same person: where the one function appears to them inadvisable, they exercise the other.

Great men's errors are to be venerated as more fruitful than little men's truths.