Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.

Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.

How do you expect to learn to dance when you have not even learned to walk! And above the dancer is still the flyer and his bliss.

O sancta simplicitas! What strange simplification and falsification mankind lives on! One can never cease to marvel once one has acquired eyes for this marvel! How we have made everything around us bright and free and easy and simple! How we have known how to bestow on our senses a passport to everything superficial, on our thoughts a divine desire for wanton gambling and false conclusions! - how we have from the very beginning understood how to retain our ignorance so as to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, frivolity, impetuosity, bravery, cheerfulness of life, so as to enjoy life!

Well-meaning, helpful, good-natured attitudes of mind have not come to be honored on account of their usefulness, but because they are states of richer souls that are capable of bestowing and have their value in the feeling of the plenitude of life.

It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it withdraws that I knowr its affinity and solidarity with the other.

In affability there is no hatred of men, but for that very reason there is all too much contempt for men.