- Instead of saving humanity, every person should save himself.
2. To see oneself in print is one of the strongest artificial passions of an age corrupted by books. But it requires courage, nevertheless, to venture on a public exhibition of one’s productions.
3. Compassionate love may be strong. It sobs it burns, then it wipes away its tears – and it does nothing.
4. Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.
5. We are not the doctors. We are the disease.
6. We think the purpose of a child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.
7. Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years, but it is hard for them ever to lead or dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.
8. There is no art more akin to mysticism than architecture.
9. Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.
10. I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought.
11. You can awaken people by dreaming their dreams more clearly than they dream themselves.
12. One must open men’s eyes, not tear them out.
13. It is possible to lead astray an entire generation, to strike it blind, to drive it insane, to direct it towards a false goal. Napoleon proved this.
14. I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.
15. What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all palisades, all fences, within which she is held captive!
16. There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse: you can hit it, you can knock it to pieces, but you cannot convince it.
17. History is the autobiography of a madman.
