Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.

On the pinnacle of success man does not stand firm long.

Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.

We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.

Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.