I’m not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.
What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.
The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
Whisky is liquid sunshine.
Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of.
To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.
The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements.
A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.
Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.
The sound body is the product of the sound mind.
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
Music is the brandy of the damned.
New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.
Liberty is the breath of life to nations.
Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.