Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.

He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them.

Every epoch which seeks renewal first projects its ideal into a human form. In order to comprehend its own essence tangibly, the spirit of the time chooses a human being as its prototype and raising this single individual, often one upon whom it has chanced to come, far beyond his measure, the spirit enthuses itself for its own enthusiasm.

Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.

Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.