I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia.

I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives.

The sea appears all golden. Beneath the sun-lit sky.

The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought.

At noon I feel as though I could devour all the elephants of Hindostan, and then pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg cathedral; in the evening I become so sentimental that I would fain drink up the Milky Way without reflecting how indigestible I should find the little fixed stars, and by night there is the Devil himself broke loose in my head and no mistake.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.