The little honesty that exists among authors is discernible in the unconscionable way they misquote from the writings of others.
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.
The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
Genius is an intellect that has become unfaithful to its destiny.
A man of talent will strive for money and reputation; but the spring that moves genius to the production of its works is not as easy to name.
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.
Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?
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.