What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time - and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.