Kindliness, friendliness, the courtesy of the heart, are ever-flowing streams of non egoistic impulses, and have given far more powerful assistance to culture than even those much more famous demonstrations which are called pity, mercy, and self-sacrifice.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.

Go through the towns and ask yourselves whether these people should reproduce! Let them go to their whores!

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.

Like tourists huffing and puffing to reach the peak we forget the view on the way up.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.