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.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.

Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die.

The familiarity of superiors embitters one, because it may not be returned.

The grand style follows suit with all great passion. It disdains to please, it forgets to persuade. It commands. It wills.

The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep--where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The 'savage' (or, in moral terms, the evil man) is a return to nature--and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from 'culture'.