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.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.

There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day to my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing.

Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

People who, out of an inborn moderation, leave every glass standing only half-emptied refuse to admit that everything in the world has its sediments and dregs.

What an age experiences as evil is usually an untimely reverberation echoing what was previously experienced as good--the atavismof an older ideal.