I despise a world which does not feel that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.

Too much respect for other people's wisdom will make you depreciate your own.

To know all is to despise all.

It's sad to see Time's toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.

Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly.

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder

Books are not life, only its ashes.

Stupidity is doomed,
therefore, to cringe
at every syllable
of wisdom.

Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.

It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not.