Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

Actions can be promised, but not feelings, for these are involuntary.

And in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine,

he wishes himself to gather the fruit from the tree that he plants and consequently he no longer plants those trees which require centuries of constant cultivation and are destined to afford shade to generation after generation in the future.

organic beings are primordially interested by nothing whatever in any thing (Ding) except its relation to ourselves with reference to pleasure and pain.

through the medium of profound feelings one can penetrate deep into the soul of things (Innre), draw close to the heart of nature

feeling is deep because we deem the thoughts accompanying it deep.

you had to become master over yourself,

due to the very nature and being of the "thing-in-itself."

Philosophical problems, in almost all their aspects, present themselves in the same interrogative formula now that they did two thousand years ago: how can a thing develop out of its antithesis?

What!? Everything is merely—human—all too human?