The person portrayed and the portrait are two entirely different things.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

History is the science of people.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

There is but one way left to save a classic; to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

The struggle with the past is not a hand-to-hand fight. The future overcomes it by swallowing it. If it leaves anything outside it is lost.

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."