There are people who are so presumptuous that they know no other way to praise a greatness that they publicly admire than by representing it as a preliminary stage and bridge leading to themselves.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?

Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell.

Those people have no real interest in a science who only begin to get excited about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.

Marriages that made out of love (so-called "love-matches") have error as their father and misery (necessity) as their mother.