Belief in form, but disbelief in content - that's what makes an aphorism charming.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

A vocation is the backbone of life.

The earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.