Everything that is ponderous, vicious and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying kinds of style, are developed in great variety among Germans.

The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason.

There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!

The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.

Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she forgets how to charm.

Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.

I am not bigoted enough for a system-and not even for my system.