You should know both the universal and the personal, the realm of forms and the freedom to not cling to them. The forms of the world have their place, but in another way, there is nothing there. To be free, we need to respect both of these truths.
I am sure of this, that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would be not half the disorders in the world there are now. It would be a famous good thing for us all.
It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practiced it in a tent.
I wanted to be born at the farthest limit of the world. I'll explore it, I said to myself, biting big chunks from it. And when I want, I'll go straight to the core. This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.
I did not bring Deism into Bavaria more than into Rome. I found it here, in great vigour, more abounding than in any of the neighboring Protestant States. I am proud to be known to the world as the founder of the Illuminati.
Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.