A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

Love brings to light a lover's noble and hidden qualities-his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive of his normal qualities.

Men are cowards when it comes to the "eternally feminine": and the little women know it.

The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives, and greater again in proportion to their outer restlessness.

The strength required for the vision of the most powerful reality is not only compatible with the most powerful strength for action, for monstrous action, for crime - it even presupposes it.

Aphorisms should be peaks - and those who are addressed, tall and lofty. The air thin and pure, danger near, and the spirit full of gay sarcasm: these go well together.