When you say 'Yes' or promise something, you can very easily deceive yourself and others also, as if you had already done what you promised. It is easy to think that by making a promise you have at least done part of what you promised to do, as if the promise itself were something of value. Not at all! In fact, when you do not do what you promise, it is a long way back to the truth.

Purity of heart is to will one thing.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states).

The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.

A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.