What are the characteristics of today's world so that one may recognize it by them?" It pays pensions and borrows money: credit and monuments.
Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.
Since love is folly, a foolish woman is more dangerous than a wise one.
Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.
There shall be no slave in your home, male or female: Least of all the mother of your son.
Uneducated people are unfortunate in that they do grasp complex issues, educated people, on the other hand, often do not understand simplicity, which is a far greater misfortune.
History is the zoology of the human race.
Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.
Feeling and thinking are actually the blind man who carries the lame.
The military and the clergy cause us much annoyance; the clergy and the military, they empty our wallets and rob our intelligence.
Even with limited intelligence, knowing oneself is not as difficult as some say, but to act according to what one has realized about oneself in real life is as difficult as practicing anything else, compared to theory.
The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.
The cradle of the future is the grave of the past.
Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.
The most irascible person is most likely to become apathetic in dangerous situations.
What a pathetic creature is man! His senses are awakened by the hope for the very thing whose consummation puts him to sleep.
Let no one say that taking action is hard. Action is aided by courage, by the moment, by impulse, and the hardest thing in the world is making a decision.
I notice well that one stray step from the habitual path leads irresistibly into a new direction. Life moves forward, it never reverses its course.
I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself.
Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.
Do you think that it is possible to have a mere taste of commonness? Either one hates it or makes common cause with it.
Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?
Pity, but never love bestows kind words upon the slave.
Our age believed herself pregnant with auspicious progeny, but when her hour came, it turned out to be dropsy.
Let the will embrace the highest ideals freely and with infinite strength, but let action first take hold of what lies closest.
