Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others.

Was mich nicht zugrunde richtet, macht mich starker.

The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we have 'improved.

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

Beware in the presence of cats: they never give, they do not even retaliate--they only reply, and purr in doing so.