“Das einzige Mittel, den Irrtum zu vermeiden, ist die Unwissenheit.”

“Die Freiheit des Menschen liegt nicht darin, dass er tun kann, was er will, sondern dass er nicht tun muss, was er nicht will.”

“Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control,constraint, compulsion. Civilised man is born and dies a slave.The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is naileddown in his coffin. All his life long man is imprisoned by ourinstitutions.”

“Teach him to live rather than to avoid death: life is not breath,but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, everypart of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being. Lifeconsists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living.A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all.He would have fared better had he died young.”

“I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.”

“We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish,we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need whenwe come to man's estate, is the gift of education.”

“رُحت أتأمل وضع بني آدم البئيسين، يسبحون في بحر هائل من الآراء لا دليل لهم ولا مشير. تتقاذفهم أهواؤهم الهائجة، لا معين لهم سوى ملاح غير مجرب، يجهل الطريق، لا يعرف من أين أتى وأين يتجه. كنت أسرّ لنفسي: أتوخى الحق، أبحث عنه ولا أتبيّنه. ليرشدني إليه مرشد وسأتعلق به طول حياتي. لماذا يحتجب الحق عن قلب متشوق إليه متحمس لعبادته ؟”