Good manners disappear in proportion as the influence of a Court and an exclusive aristocracy lessens; this decrease can be plainly observed from decade to decade by those who have an eye for public behavior, which grows visibly.

He who does not need to lie is proud of not being a liar.

In a seriously intended intellectual emancipation a person's mute passions and cravings also hope to find their advantage.

Posthumous men-myself, for example-are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood-hence our authority.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear.