If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.

No man is a hero to his valet de chamber

Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.

To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.

History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.

The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.