The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts. For these others speak only of the shadow — but music of the essence.

If the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly. Nay — they would go mad.

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellow men.

There is a certain kind of courage which springs from the same source as good nature.

When patriotism tries to urge its claims in the domain of knowledge, it commits an offence which should not be tolerated.

There is a certain kind of man who places his life's happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.

Voltaire was perfectly right when he said that the aim of all war is robbery.

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

A dull mind is, as a rule, associated with dull sensibilities, nerves which no stimulus can affect. A temperament, in short, which does not feel pain or anxiety very much, however great or terrible it may be.

Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry.

The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.

There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion.

For some people of crude susceptibilities and clumsy intelligence, sordid in their pursuits and sunk in drudgery, religion provides the only means of proclaiming and making them feel the high import of life.

Your estimation of a man's size will be affected by the distance at which you stand from him, but in two entirely opposite ways according as it is his physical or his mental stature that you are considering.

A lie always has its origin in the desire to extend the dominion of one's own will over other individuals, and to deny their will in order the better to affirm one's own.

If it has really come to this, then farewell, humanity! Farewell, noble taste and high thinking!

If a man desires to be great, he should never allow his consciousness to be taken possession of and dominated by the movement of his will, however much he may be solicited thereto.

If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.

The appearance of every animal presents a totality, a unity, a perfection, and a rigidly carried out harmony in all its parts. This is so entirely based upon a single fundamental thought, that even the strangest animal shape seems to the attentive observer as if it were the only right, nay, only possible form of…

Most men who are placed beyond the struggle with poverty feel at bottom quite as unhappy as those who are still engaged in it.