I was not afraid of what I did not like. To overcome dislike of a thing often satisfied one’s feeling of honour.
Being gifted needs courage.
That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.
The crowd will follow a leader who marches twenty paces ahead of them, but if he is a thousand paces ahead of them, they will neither see nor follow him.
Instead of trying to educate the human race, they should imitate the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who concentrated their efforts on the education of a single person.
Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.
What is public opinion? It is private indolence.
It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow.
I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.
But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.
School is a foretaste of life.
My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.
I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.
The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth.
It is useless to send armies against ideas.
Dostoevsky preaches the morality of the pariah, the morality of the slave.
I came into the world two months too soon, I was in such a hurry.
When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.
The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity...
Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.