Boredom is certainly not an evil to be taken lightly: it will ultimately etch lines of true despair onto a face. It makes beings with as little love for each other as humans nonetheless seek each other with such intensity, and in this way becomes the source of sociability.
God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism.
How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity! –.
Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.
Better alone than amongst traitors.
Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health.
Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people. The mistaken views of life, which spring from a false application of general ideas, have afterwards to be corrected by long years of experience; and it is seldom that they are wholly corrected.
Every society requires mutual accommodation and mutually agreeable temper; hence the larger it is, the duller.
All geniuses are peculiarly inclined to solitude, to which they are driven as much by their difference from others as the inner wealth with which they are quipped, since among humans, among diamonds, only the uncommonly great are suited as solitaires: the ordinary ones must be set in clusters to produce any effect.
For the longer to have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will is stay once you have got it.
La vida es una guerra sin tregua, y se muere con las armas en la mano.
Virtue cannot be taught, no more than genius; indeed, concepts are as unfruitful for it as for art and of use only as tools.
If we are distracted and read thoughtlessly, and then realize that we have indeed taken in all the words, but no concepts.
The only certain rule is the one that Aristotle already gave: do not dispute with anyone and everyone, but only with those people you know who are intelligent enough to avoid saying things that are so stupid as to expose themselves to humiliation, who appreciate the truth, and who gladly listen to good reasons, even when the opponent claims them, and who are balanced enough to bear a defeat when the truth is on the other side.
Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
You can also look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.
You can know only what you have thought about.
If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole, and, in particular, the generations of men as they live their little hour of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession; if we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems!
Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
Directly after copulation, the devil’s laughter is heard.