My heart resembles the ocean; has storm, and ebb and flow; and many a beautiful pearl lies hid in its depths below.

All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

Out of my great sorrows, I make little songs.

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid