But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty.

You train yourself in the art of being mysterious to everyone. My dear friend! What if there were no one, who cared about guessing your riddle, what pleasure would you then take in it?

If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.

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.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

To grumble about the world and its unhappiness is always easier than to beat one's breast and groan over oneself.

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation.