"There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them."

"If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later."

"There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven."

"Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity."

"Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams."

"Sickness is mankind's greatest defect."

"The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders."

"What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?"

"Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism."

"Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself."

"It is certainly not a matter of indifference whether I learn something without effort or finally arrive at it myself through my system of thought. In the latter case everything has roots, in the former it is merely superficial."

"When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so."

"You believe that I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange."

"People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles."

"It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard."

"What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others."

"He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection."

"There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking."

"To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so."

"Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it."

"The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery."

"The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things."

"The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it."

"We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest."

"The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted."

"He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals."

"Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much."

"With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet."

"Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy."

"A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species."

"A great speech is easy to learn by heart and a great poem even easier. How hard it would be to memorize as many words linked together senselessly, or a speech in a foreign tongue! Sense and understanding thus come to the aid of memory. Sense is order and order is in the last resort conformity with our nature. When we speak rationally we are only speaking in accordance with the nature of our being. That is why we devise genera and species in the case of plants and animals. The hypotheses we make belong here too: we are obliged to have them because otherwise we would unable to retain things... The question is, however, whether everything is legible to us. Certainly experiment and reflection enable us to introduce a significance into what is not legible, either to us or at all: thus we see faces or landscapes in the sand, though they are certainly not there. The introducion of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing."

"The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter."

"Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates."

"One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use."

"The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority."

"It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into."

"It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him."

"Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will."

"One has to do something new in order to see something new."

"Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older."

"Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions."

"The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle."

"To be content with life — or to live merrily, rather — all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow."

"It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories."

"Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming."

"Man loves company — even if it is only that of a small burning candle."

"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery."

"To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still."

"If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly."

"It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists."