Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.

There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.

What does it matter whether I am shown to be right! I am right too much!--And he who laughs best today will also laugh last.

Men submit from habit to everything that seeks power.

Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

So far there has been no philosopher in whose hands philosophy has not grown into an apology for knowledge; on this point, at least, every one is an optimist, that the greatest usefulness must be ascribed to knowledge. They are all tyrannized over by logic, and this is optimism in its essence.