Examine the life of the best and most productive men and nations, and ask yourselves whether a tree which is to grow proudly skywards can dispense with bad weather and storms. Whether misfortune and opposition, or every kind of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, distrust, severity, greed, and violence do not belong to the favourable conditions without which a great growth even of virtue is hardly possible?

The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.

You must await your thirst and allow it to become complete: otherwise you will never discover your spring, which can never be anyone else's!

Every virtue inclines to stupidity, every stupidity to virtue; "stupid to the point of sanctity," they say in Russia, - let us be careful lest out of pure honesty we eventually become saints and bores!

There will be but few people who, when at a loss for topics of conversation, will not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends.

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.