“Of all afflictions, the worst is self contempt.”

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.

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.

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.

Weak men are easily put out of humor. Oil freezes quicker than water.

To acquire money requires valor, to keep money requires prudence, and to spend money well is an art.

It is only when one is thoroughly true that there can be purity and freedom. Falsehood always punishes itself.

To harbor hatred and animosity in the soul makes one irritable, gloomy, and prematurely old.

Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts and strives without fear to do justice to them.

Our second mother, habit, is also a good mother.

People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.