Do whatever you will, but first be such as are able to will.

At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.

Those who create are hard of heart.

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly.