Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

It was modesty that invented the word "philosopher" in Greece and left the magnificent overweening presumption in calling oneselfwise to the actors of the spirit--the modesty of such monsters of pride and sovereignty as Pythagoras, as Plato.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.

We criticize a man or a book most sharply when we sketch out their ideal.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.