An oath is a recognizance to heaven, binding us over in the courts above to plead to the indictment of our crimes.
All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.
The symmetry and organization of history teaches us that mankind, during its existence and development, genuinely was and became an individual, a person. In this great personality of mankind, God became man.
If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.
A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.
The highest good and solely useful is liberal education.
The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.
Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.
I found that the men and women who got to the top were those who did the jobs they had in hand, with everything they had of energy and enthusiasm and hard work.
The truth is that nothing has to happen in order for you to feel good.
History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.