and gazing at the growing light with joy, but also with impatience;
looking forward with longing to the advent of the full and final light,
but, nevertheless, having to turn away his eyes when the sun appeared,
unable to bear the splendor he had awaited with so much desire.

We praise the eighteenth century for concerning itself chiefly with
analysis. The task remaining to the nineteenth is to discover the false
syntheses which prevail, and to analyze their contents anew.

A school may be regarded as a single individual who talks to himself for
a hundred years, and takes an extraordinary pleasure in his own being,
however foolish and silly it may be.

In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those
fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them
further.

Nature fills all space with her limitless productivity. If we observe
merely our own earth, everything that we call evil and unfortunate is so
because Nature cannot provide room for everything that comes into
existence, and still less endow it with permanence.

The finest achievement for a man of thought is to have fathomed what may
be fathomed, and quietly to revere the unfathomable.

There are two things of which a man cannot be careful enough: of
obstinacy, if he confines himself to his own line of thought; of
incompetency, if he goes beyond it.

The century advances; but every individual begins anew.

What friends do with us and for us is a real part of our life; for it
strengthens and advances our personality. The assault of our enemies is
not part of our life; it is only part of our experience; we throw it off
and guard ourselves against it as against frost, storm, rain, hail or
any other of the external evils which may be expected to happen.

A man cannot live with every one, and therefore he cannot live for every
one. To see this truth aright is to place a high value upon one's
friends, and not to hate or persecute one's enemies. Nay, there is
hardly any greater advantage for a man to gain than to find out, if he
can, the merits of his opponents: it gives him a decided ascendency over
them.

Every one knows how to value what he has attained in life; most of all
the man who thinks and reflects in his old age. He has a comfortable
feeling that it is something of which no one can rob him.

The best metempsychosis is for us to appear again in others.

It is very seldom that we satisfy ourselves; all the more consolin