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.
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.
The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.
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 not seldom happens that in the purposeless rovings and wanderings of the imagination we hunt down such game as can be put to use by our purposeful philosophy in its well-ordered household.
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.
There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
Honor is infinitely more valuable than positions of honor.
If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.
Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.
How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.
Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.
No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.
Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
The highest point to which a weak but experienced mind can rise is detecting the weakness of better men.
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