What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go contemplating wastelands; then you set.

If content with himself and mankind, a man is never harsh or curt.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.