What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet’s tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.
Truth is most beautiful undraped.
He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?
Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.
One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one’s own being.
Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.
For our improvement we need a mirror.
A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.
Everything that happens, happens of necessity.
To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.