The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.

There is no God, cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values — is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.

The soul of a landscape, the spirits of the elements, the genius of every place will be revealed to a loving view of nature.

Greatness of mind becomes an object of love only when the power at work in it itself has a noble character

The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is not one of submission, but of a contest for truth.