The century advances; but every individual begins anew.

What friends do with us and for us is a real part of our life; for it strengthens and advances our personality.  The assault of our enemies is not part of our life; it is only part of our experience; we throw it off and guard ourselves against it as against frost, storm, rain, hail or any other of the external evils which may be expected to happen.

A man cannot live with every one, and therefore he cannot live for every one.  To see this truth aright is to place a high value upon one’s friends, and not to hate or persecute one’s enemies.  Nay, there is hardly any greater advantage for a man to gain than to find out, if he can, the merits of his opponents:  it gives him a decided ascendency over them.

Every one knows how to value what he has attained in life; most of all the man who thinks and reflects in his old age.  He has a comfortable feeling that it is something of which no one can rob him.

The best metempsychosis is for us to appear again in others.

It is very seldom that we satisfy ourselves; all the more consoling is it to have satisfied others.

We look back upon our life only as on a thing of broken pieces, because our misses and failures are always the first to strike us, and outweigh in our imagination what we have done and attained.

Nature!  We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp—­powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her.  Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.

We live in the midst of her and are strangers.  She speaks to us unceasingly and betrays not her secret.

We are always influencing her and yet can do her no violence.

Individuality seems to be all her aim, and she cares naught for individuals.  She is always building and always destroying, and her work-shop is not to be approached.

Nature lives in her children only, and the mother, where is she?  She is the sole artist—­out of the simplest materials the greatest diversity; attaining, with no trace of effort, the finest perfection, the closest precision, always softly veiled.  Each of her works has an essence of its own; every shape that she takes is in idea utterly isolated; and yet all forms one.

She plays a drama; whether she sees it herself, we know not; and yet she plays it for us who stand but a little way off.

She has thought, and she ponders unceasingly; not as a man, but as Nature.  The meaning of the whole she keeps to herself, and no one can learn it of her.

She rejoices in illusion.  If a man destroys this in himself and others, she punishes him like the hardest tyrant.  If he follows her in confidence, she presses him to her heart as if it were her child.

Her children are numberless.  To no one of them is she altogether niggardly; but she has her favorites, on whom she lavishes much, and for whom she makes many a sacrifice.  Over the great she has spread the shield of her protection.