People can only live with their equals, and not even with them; for in the long run they cannot tolerate that someone is their equal.
What is part of you, you cannot get rid of, even if you were to throw it away.
If one doesn’t know one’s own country, one doesn’t have standards for foreign countries.
When married one has to get into an argument once in a while since in this way one learns about the other.
Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?
Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals.
No matter what one says, you can recognize only those matters that are equal to you. Only rulers who possess extraordinary abilities will recognize and esteem properly extraordinary abilities in their subjects and servants.
One must not criticize that which is common since it remains always the same.
We cannot and must not get rid of nor deny our characteristics. But we can give them shape and direction.
One can’t dull a project better than by discussing it repeatedly.
For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.
New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.
As soon as you are in a social setting, you better take away the key to the lock of your heart and pocket it; those who leave thekey in the lock are fools.
One needs only to get old to become milder; I don’t see anyone make a mistake I hadn’t also made.
Someone criticized an elderly man for wooing young women. He replied that that was the only way to rejuvenation, which was, afterall, everybody’s wish.
It doesn’t behoove elderly persons to follow fashion in their thinking nor in the way they dress.
We can most safely achieve truly universal tolerance when we respect that which is characteristic in the individual and in nations, clinging, though, to the conviction that the truly meritorious is unique by belonging to all of mankind.
One criticizes the English for carrying their teapots wherever they go, even lugging them up Mount Etna. But doesn’t every nationhave its teapot, in which, even when traveling, it brews the dried bundles of herbs brought from home?
Superstition belongs to the essence of mankind and takes refuge, when one thinks one has suppressed it completely, in the strangest nooks and crannies; once it is safely ensconced there, it suddenly reappears.
We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.