There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.

These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one's experiences in common.

Today I love myself as I love my god: who could charge me with a sin today? I know only sins against my god; but who knows my god?

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.