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.
The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.
Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.
It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.
Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.
Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.
The dressmaker doesn’t have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.