“The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.”

To know a truth well, one must have fought it out.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing.

The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal.

We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the visible.

Nature is an aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.

There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity.

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.

If the world is a precipitation of human nature, so to speak, then the divine world is a sublimation of the same. Both occur in one act. No precipitation without sublimation. What goes lost there in agility, is won here.

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.

You are alone with everything you love.

One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand.

A God-intoxicated man.

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.

We never completely comprehend ourselves, but we can do far more than comprehend.

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

But what is great can only begin great.

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle – friendship can only exist between good men.

The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.

A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.

All human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.