Give me those days with heart in riot, The depths of bliss that touched on pain, The force of hate, and love’s disquiet- Ah, give me back my youth again!
All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.
Every great idea exerts, on first appearing, a tyrannical influence: Hence, the advantages it brings are turned all too soon into disadvantages.
No one knows what he is doing so long as he is acting rightly; but of what is wrong one is always conscious.
None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
If society gives up the right to impose the death penalty, then self-help will appear again and personal vendettas will be around the corner.
We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.
The mark of highest originality lies in the ability to develop a familiar idea so fruitfully that it would seem no one else would ever have discovered so much to be hidden in it.
The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.
Beware of a man of one book.
Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.
In all times it is only individuals that have advanced science, not the age.
Experiments are mediators between nature and idea.
The arts are the salt of the earth; as salt relates to food, the arts relate to technology.
Microscopes and telescopes really confuse our minds.
Mozart is a human incarnation of the divine force of creation.
My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
There is no outward sign of true courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation.
You shall abstain, shall abstain. That is the eternal song.