What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent weakens--when he stops showing what he can do. Talent, too, is ornamentation, and ornamentation, too, is a hiding place.

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure.

Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.

When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.