“One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.

Fear is the destructive energy in man. It withers the mind, it distorts thought, it leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.

Here lies one who knew how to get around him, men who were cleverer than himself

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.

Fools lie, clever men stick to the truth.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

Life, it turns out, is infinitely more clever and adaptable than anyone had ever supposed.