“It is not conflict of opinions that has made history so violent but conflict of belief in opinions, that is to say conflict of convictions.”

“Even the wisest among you is only a conflict and hybrid of plant and ghost.”

“So long as the spectator has to figure out the meaning of this or that person, or the presuppositions of this or that conflict of inclinations and purposes, he cannot become completely absorbed in the activities and sufferings of the chief characters or feel breathless pity and fear.”

“We are so fond of being out in Nature because it has no opinions of us.”

“Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.”

“One sticks to an opinion because he prides himself on having come to it on his own, and another because he has taken great pains to learn it and is proud to have grasped it: and so both do so out of vanity.”

“Facta! Yes, Facta ficta! - A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect. Likewise only with supposed heroes. His theme, so-called world history, is opinions about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which is however at once vaporised again and produces an effect only as vapour - a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impentetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination.”