The object of convalescence ought to be to turn our attention to life: at other times, simply to our tasks!

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

No artist tolerates reality.

Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth.

I am a law only for my kind, I am no law for all.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

What is wanted - whether this is admitted or not - is nothing less than a fundamental remolding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicating all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members.