Sometimes we owe a friend to the lucky circumstance that we give him no cause for envy.

He is wholly without envy, but there is not merit therein: for he wants to conquer a land which no one yet possessed and hardly any one has ever seen.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Compassion for the friend should conceal itself under a hard shell

The Good Man
Better an enmity from one block
than friendship held together by glue.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything -and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.