Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers -- at bottom, merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

The people who marry make a good marriage not marriage in itself.

The Germans -- once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things. . .

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.