If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.

Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.

This being busied with thoughts of immortality is for the noble classes and especially for women with nothing to do. A solid person, though, someone who already intends to be something worthy here, and who therefore has to strive daily, has to struggle and work, gives the world to come a rest.

What chance gathers, she easily scatters. A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

I could never have known so well how paltry men are, and how little they care for really high aims, if I had not tested them by my scientific researches. Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.