To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both -- a philosopher.

Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ''divine service.''

It was modesty which in Greece invented the word "philosopher" and left the splendid arrogance of calling oneself wise to the actors of the spirit --the modesty of such monsters of pride and self-glorification as Pythagoras, as Plato.