We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.