If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.

Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it.

Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.

It's better to get lost in the passion than to lose the passion

All moral elevation consists first and foremost of being weaned from the momentary.

The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.

The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo; the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.