Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms wants not to be learned but to be learned by heart.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.

The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another.

One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it.