Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Whoever has witnessed another's ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

He who knows himself to be profound endeavors to be clear; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd endeavors to be obscure.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.