It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn’t.
In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.
The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another’s money. Idiots!
It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.
There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.
The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.