One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.

You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu , virtue free of moral acid).

It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!

The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.

Christianity is Platonism for the people.

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.