If we lacked curiosity, we should do less for the good of our neighbor. But, under the name of duty or pity, curiosity steals into the home of the unhappy and the needy. Perhaps even in the famous mother-love there is a good deal of curiosity.

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

When we dream about those who are long since forgotten or dead, it is a sign that we have undergone a radical transformation and that the ground on which we live has been completely dug up: then the dead rise up, and our antiquity becomes modernity.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.