The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation.

We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all.

Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.

In comradeship is danger countered best.

Sceptics are yet the most credulous.

The force of a language does not consist of rejecting what is foreign but of swallowing it.