For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

All office workers are afraid of being late for work.

Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors.

Only the rare expands our minds, only as we shudder in the face of a new force do our feelings increase. Therefore the extraordinary is always the measure of all greatness. And the creative element always remains the value superior to all others and the mind superior to our minds.

It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.