Men seldom persevere in a vocation unless they believe or can convince themselves that it is fundamentally more important than anyother calling. Women are the same with their lovers.

Plato was a bore.

Is not wounded vanity the mother of all tragedies?

Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and 'freedom of will' are then one in them.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.