The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.

It quite often happens that the old man is subject to the delusion of a great moral renewal and rebirth, and from this experience he passes judgments on the work and course of his life, as if he had only now become clear-sighted; and yet the inspiration behind this feeling of well-being and these confident judgements is not wisdom, but weariness .

Those you cannot teach to fly, teach to fall faster.

In the whole of the New Testament there is not one joke, that fact alone would invalidate any book.

Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.

A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.

Heaping glowing coals on another person's head is usually misunderstood and comes to nothing because the other person knows just as well that he is in the right and has also given some thought on his own part to heaping coals.