Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor.
If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called “success” with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can’t reciprocate her feelings.
The sight of a wedding always has a disturbing effect on young girls; at such moments a mysterious sense of solidarity with their own sex takes possession of them.
On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.
The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence.
Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.
A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings – they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.
All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.
It is a law of life that human beings, even the geniuses among them, do not pride themselves on their actual achievements but thatthey want to impress others, want to be admired and respected because of things of much lower import and value.
And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you – it’s born with us the day that we are born.