I am still attracted by everything in Hobbes: his intellectual courage, the courage of a man filled with fear; his highhanded learning, which senses with a peerless instinct what it has to confront in itself, and what it has to leave aside as empty and drained; his restraint, which allows him to hold mature and powerful thoughts back for decades, determining their moment by himself, uninfluenced and ruthless; the joy in that closed ring of enemies around him—his being his own party, letting some people think he can be used, but knowing how to defend himself against abuse, and without ever going after low power, doing only what creates an audience for his ideas; his constancy through so much liveliness and freshness of his mind; his distrust of concepts (what else is his "materialism"?) and also his great age. I sometimes wonder whether my liking him is overly affected by those ninety-one years he reached. For I almost never agree with the results of his thinking: his mathematical superstition says nothing to me, and it is his conception of power that I want to destroy.
But I trust him; the processes of his life and thought strike me as unadulterated. He is the adversary whom I hear; he never bores me, and I admire the terseness and power of his language. The notional superstition of later philosophers is a thousand times more unpleasant to me than his mathematical superstition. I trust him and I trust his years. It's true that I wish I could have as many years as he did, for how else can I achieve the same constancy, the same testing, affirming, confirming of my fundamental experiences—which are today the same for all, one only has to give them time to permeate one totally.