"The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak."

"I have seen that fervent ambition and mistrustfulness always go together."

"If I had not written this book then a thousand years hence between six and seven in the evening people would in many a town in Germany be talking about quite different things from what they will in fact be talking about..."

"This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature."

"I believe we would always bloom and blossom as youth does if we could be always so carefree; or is it, on the contrary, blooming and blossoming that makes one carefree?"

"If Heaven should find it useful and necessary to produce a new edition of me and my life I would like to make a few not superfluous suggestions for this new edition chiefly concerning the design of the frontispiece and the way the work is laid out."

"Like a great philosophical babbler he is concerned not so much with the truth as with the sound of his prose."

"Devised with a maximum of erudition and a minimum of common sense."

"He is already in his forties and is still wearing red linings and bright colors. Thus he will never get into the lexicon of history, either as a genius or a rascal."

"To make known the weaknesses of the great is a kind of duty: in doing so one comforts thousands without doing the great any harm."

"There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven."

"Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?"

"Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets a tremendous erection."

"Among the greatest discoveries human reason has made in recent times is, in my opinion, the art of reviewing books without having read them."

"Every man also has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum."

"Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments? Reasons are often and for the most part only expositions of pretensions designed to give a coloring of legitimacy and rationality to something we would have done in any case."

"Rulers are not generally good men... How can we expect human affairs to proceed in a tolerable fashion? Of what use are introductions into the art of commercial management if the overlord is some buffoon who acknowledges no sovereignty but that of his own stupidity, caprice, whores and valets?"

"They sell everything except their shirt and then go on selling."

"If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read."

"What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others."

"Our inability to learn in later years is connected with our unwillingness to take orders in later years, and is so very closely."

"It is a question whether in the arts and sciences a best is possible beyond which our understanding cannot go. Perhaps this point is infinitely distant, notwithstanding that with every closer approximation we have less in front of us."

"To excuse one's own failings as being only human nature is, provided one has meant well, every writer's first duty to himself."

"The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use."

"He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards."

"We are only too inclined to believe that if we possess a little talent work must come easily to us. You must exert yourself, man, if you want to do something great."

"I have seen that fervent ambition and mistrustfulness always go together."

"It is a fault common to all people of little talent and more reading than understanding that they hit upon ingenious rather than natural explanations."

"Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind."

"There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them..."

"There are fanatics without ability, and then they are really dangerous people."

"I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account."

"Kings often believe that what their generals and admirals do is done out of patriotism and zeal for their own honor. But the whole motivation of great deeds is more often a girl who reads the newspapers."

"I have frequently been censured for errors I have committed which those who have censured me had not the energy or the wit to commit themselves."

"You should never look for genuine Christian convictions in a man who makes a parade of his piety."

"All we really have are transplanters of novels and comedies. Few are raised from seed."

"Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will."

"We read so much about genius nowadays everyone believes he is one. The man who early on regards himself as a genius is lost."

"The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things."

"If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It."

"Although I know, of course, that very many reviewers do not read the books they review in so exemplary a way, I nonetheless cannot see what harm it could do if one were to read a book one is intending to review."

"Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous."

"One can repeat a thing in the way it has already been said, remove it further from human understanding, or bring it closer to it: the shallow mind does the first, the enthusiast the second, the true philosopher the third."

"You must not look for order in this little book. Order is a daughter of reflection, and my enemies have devoted so little reflection to me I cannot see why I should devote any to them."

"Before you damn to Hell any great criminal whose story you have read just give thanks to benevolent Heaven that it did not place you, with your fair and honest face, at the commencement of such a succession of circumstances."

"Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them."

"The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism."

"Is it not strange that men are so keen to fight for religion and so unkeen to live according to its precepts?"

"He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery..."

"It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written."