Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out.

It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The people we have employed in an undertaking that has turned out badly should be doubly rewarded.

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?

The love of one sole being is a barbarism; for it will be employed to the detriment of all the rest. So too the love of God.

The desire for a strong faith is not the proof of a strong faith, rather the opposite. If one has it one may permit oneself the beautiful luxury of skepticism: one is secure enough, fixed enough for it.