Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

Most people are too stupid to act in their own interest

The people we keep standing in the anteroom of our favor either start fermenting or turn sour.

Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!

It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even-quench thirst any more?