“All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.”

The silver-leaved birch retains in its old age a soft bark; there are some such men.

Liberty is from God; liberties, from the devil.

With hat in hand, one gets on in the world.

The world is the same everywhere.

Discontent is the source of all trouble,but also of all progress, in individuals and nations.

We consider it tedious to talk of the weather, and yet there is nothing more important.

Being alone when one’s belief is firm, is not to be alone.

What will people say-in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.

Years teach us more than books.

Gratitude is a soil on which joy thrives.

If you sound great in the practice room, you’re practicing the wrong thing. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self contempt.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning … for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

Some men, like modern shops, hang everything in their show windows; when one goes inside, nothing is to be found.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

Truly, one gets easier accustomed to a silken bed than to a sack of leaves.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

We have no patience with other people’s vanity because it is offensive to our own.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

We say little, when vanity does not make us speak.

Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.