A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at the end, for a pleasant death.

In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.

The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own--that is, for his age--so as to be able even then to take pleasurein himself.

With deep men, as with deep wells, it takes a long time for anything that falls into them to hit bottom. Onlookers, who almost never wait long enough, readily suppose that such men are callous and unresponsive--or even boring.

Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.

The lie is a condition of life.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.