Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.
The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others.
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own.
Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
I build a kind of wall between myself and the model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.
Because one doesn't like the way things are is no reason to be unjust towards God.
Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.
When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
Bad men are full of repentance.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
Fear is the mother of morality.
Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
The best is the enemy of the good.
Many men are contemptuous of riches few can give them away.
Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
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