Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value.
Reason looks at necessity as the basis of the world; reason is able to turn chance in your favor and use it. Only by having reasonremain strong and unshakable can we be called a god of the earth.
One spares old people just as one spares children.
Translators can be considered as busy matchmakers who praise as extremely desirable a half-veiled beauty. They arouse an irresistible yearning for the original.
When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.
One usually thinks people to be more dangerous than they are.
Many hammer all over the wall and believe that with each blow they hit the nail on the head.
We who didn’t inherit political power nor are made to acquire riches like nothing better than that which expands and solidifies the power of the spirit.
What you desire when young, you have in abundance when old.
Even though the world as a whole progresses, youth must always start again from the beginning, and as individuals go through the epochs of the world’s culture.
If youth is a fault, it is one that one gets rid of soon enough.
To become aware in time when young of the advantages of age; to maintain the advantages of youth in old age: both are pure fortune.
If we take people only as they are, then we make them worse; if we treat them as if they were what they should be, then we bring them to where they can be brought.
Aptitudes are assumed, they should become accomplishments. That is the purpose of all education.
There is nothing outside of us that is not at the same time in us, and as the external world has its colors the eye, too, has colors.
The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn’t perceive such things outside of us.
The eye doesn’t see any shapes, it sees only what is differentiated through light and dark or through colors.
One errs as long as one strives.
The day is for mistake and error, sequence of time for success and carrying out. The one who anticipates is master of the day.
We gladly put antiquity above our age but not posterity. Only a father doesn’t begrudge his son’s talent.