Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.

The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.

Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.

As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.

I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.