However much one generation learns from another, it can never learn from its predecessor the genuinely human factor. In this respect every generation begins afresh. Thus no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning.

It is a very curious thing about superstition. One would expect that the man who had once seen his morbid dreams were not fulfilled would abandon them for the future; but on the contrary they grow even stronger just as the love of gambling increases in a man who has once lost in a lottery.

If anyone on the verge of action should judge himself according to the outcome, he would never begin. Even though the result may gladden the whole world, that cannot help the hero; for he knows the result only when the whole thing is over, and that is not how he became a hero, but by virtue of the fact that he began.

God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?

My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.