It is a sign of a strong nature to recognize in things an indissoluble chain of causes and effects, and not simply to believe that sown grain does not produce wheat, but to extend the same laws to human life and the history of nations

For the jealous, happiness and honor appear beneath the outer cover of riches and splendor, of applause from the crowd and praise from the newspapers.

Let us suppose that fate gave someone who was jealous what he longed for with greedy eyes: it would cling to him like an inorganic growth, sucking out his strength, shattering his will and giving him new gleaming illusions

There is no question which is necessarily resolved only by the assumption of an intellectual world

A way of looking at things is not yet a knowledge

The mechanical origin of things is recognizable, but we cannot know whether there might not be a totally different one.

The organism is a form. If we ignore the form, it is a multiplicity.

You can only fully see so much as you can make and achieve yourself according to concepts

If only mechanical forces prevail in nature, then the purposeful appearances are only apparent, their purposefulness is our idea.

The viable is formed after an infinite chain of unsuccessful and half-successful attempts.

Life is possible under an amazing array of forms

I do not have a single complete college notebook, but only sad fragments.

In fact, in most colleges I was really not attracted to the subject matter at all, only the form in which the academic teacher brought his wisdom to the man.

I saw how little material is learned at universities and how nevertheless the value of such studies is highly valued on all sides.

The need for self-knowledge, even self-disclosure, seized me violently

The restless, melancholy diary sheets of that time with their useless self-accusations and their desperate looking up to the sanctification and transformation of the whole human core are still witnesses of that change.

In pulling all of my qualities and aspirations before the forum of somber self-loathing, I have been bitter, unjust, and rampant in the hatred directed against myself.

I forced myself to go to bed at 2 a.m. for 14 days in a row and to leave it at exactly 6 a.m. A nervous excitement seized me, and who knows to what degree of folly I would have advanced if the compulsion to study regularly had not acted against it.

I fantasize about a day in which we have all experienced the ecstasy of the sight of infinity and selfless unity with the uncountable set of objects that comprises nature, and see such a day as the justification and triumph of a presently rash, foreign, and controversial ambition

I came home astonishingly refreshed late at night and sat at my desk to write bitter words in the book of reflections and to cover up the vanity I had enjoyed on the blackboard of my consciousness.