To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.

The one conclusive argument that has at all times discouraged people from drinking a poison is not that it kills but rather that it tastes bad.

The inability to lie is far from the love of truth.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

In certain pious people I have found a hatred of reason, and have been favourably disposed to them for it: their bad intellectual conscience was at least exposed by that!

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but many more have sighed because no one wanted to abduct theirs.