The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.
Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to – better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.
We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.
Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.
It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.
The progress of life shows a man the stuff of which he is made.
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant’s works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.