All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are fundamentally better than any other causes in the world, and they refuse to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all it requires precisely the same foul-smelling manure that is necessary to all other human undertakings.

Out of a brotherly love we occasionally embrace this or that somebody (because we cannot embrace everybody): but we must never letour somebody know it.

When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.

Human, all too human.

It is a terrible thought, to contemplate that an immense number of mediocre thinkers are occupied with really influential matters.

Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the 'truth' one could still barely endure- or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.