The exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or pleasure or pain, which are measured like coins, the greater with the less, is not the exchange of virtue. O, my dear Simmias, is there not one true coin, for which all things ought to exchange?—and that is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is anything truly bought or sold, whether courage or temperance or justice. ...in the true exchange, there is a purging away of all these things, and temperance, and justice, and courage, and wisdom herself are a purgation of them. The Trials Of Socrates

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“All writing seems futile to me, and it really is. The best would probably be for me to go to Vienna and take you away; I may even do it, although you don’t want me to.” (9 July 1920) Letters To Milena

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.” Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind