In the matter of knowledge, it has happened to me as to one who rises early and in the dark impatiently awaits the dawn and then the sun, but is blinded when it appears.

People often say to themselves in life that they should avoid a variety of occupation, and, more particularly, be the less willing to enter upon new work the older they grow.  But it is easy to talk, easy to give advice to oneself and others.  To grow old is itself to enter upon a new business; all the circumstances change, and a man must either cease acting altogether, or willingly and consciously take over the new role.

To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible.  It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.

Napoleon lived wholly in a great idea, but he was unable to take conscious hold of it.  After utterly disavowing all ideals and denying them any reality, he zealously strove to realize them.  His clear, incorruptible intellect could not, however, tolerate such a perpetual conflict within; and there is much value in the thoughts which he was compelled, as it were, to utter, and which are expressed very peculiarly and with much charm.

Man is placed as a real being in the midst of a real world, and endowed with such organs that he can perceive and produce the real and also the possible.

All healthy men have the conviction of their own existence and of an existence around them.  However, even the brain contains a hollow spot, that is to say, a place in which no object is mirrored; just as in the eye itself there is a little spot that does not see.  If a man pays particular attention to this spot and is absorbed in it, he falls into a state of mental sickness, has presentiments of ’things of another world,’ which are, in reality, no things at all, possessing neither form nor limit, but alarming him like dark, empty tracts of night, and pursuing him as something more than phantoms, if he does not tear himself free from them.

To the several perversities of the day a man should always oppose only the great masses of universal history.  That we have many criticisms to make on those who visit us, and that, as soon as they depart, we pass no very amiable judgment upon them, seems to me almost natural; for we have, so to speak, a right to measure them by our own standard.  Even intelligent and fair-minded men hardly refrain from sharp censure on such occasions.

But if, on the contrary, we have been in their homes, and have seen them in their surroundings and habits and the circumstances which are necessary and inevitable for them; if we have seen the kind of influence they exert on those around them, or how they behave, it is only ignorance and ill-will that can find food for ridicule in what must appear to us in more than one sense worthy of respect.