Assuming that we have trained our imagination to denounce the past, we will not suffer much from unfulfilled wishes.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

We should turn our death into a celebration, even if only out of a malice towards life: towards the woman who wants to leave--us!

It is not the strengths, but the durations of great sentiments that make great men.

In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.

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.