But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.

Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesquemoments experienced by its heroes.... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow.

One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.

The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.