Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip. It ceases to persecute only him it has delivered over to boredom.
The result is that much reading robs the mind of all elasticity, as the continual pressure of a weight does a spring, and that the surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.
But history is really related to poetry as portrait painting to historical painting: the former gives us that which is true in the individual, the latter that which is true in general;.
Never combat any man’s opinion; for though you reached the age of Methuselah, you would never have done setting him right upon all the absurd things that he believes. It is also well to avoid correcting people’s mistakes in conversation, however good your intentions may be; for it is easy to offend people, and difficult, if not impossible to mend them.
Love is the best Eugenics.
Since love is a deception practiced by nature, marriage is the attrition of love and must be disillusioning. Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage and philosophers do not marry.
Fulfillment never satisfies, nothing is so fatal to an ideal than its realization.
The wise man does not seek pleasure but freedom from care and pain.
The more distinctly a man knows, the more intelligent he is, the more pain he has.
How very learned many a man would be if he knew everything that was in his own books! The consequence of this is that these writers talk in such a loose and vague manner, that the reader puzzles his brains in vain to understand what it is of which they are really thinking. They are thinking of nothing.
For to combine the object with its superficial appearance is difficult, when it is not impossible. Indeed that is just the curse of this world of want and need, that everything must serve and slave for these; and therefore it is not so constituted that any noble and sublime effort, like the endeavour after light and truth, can prosper unhindered and exist for its own sake.
Most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation.
To be happy one must be as ignorant as youth, youth thinks that willing and striving are joys – it does not yet discover the unending character of desire and the fruitless of fulfillment, It does not yet see the inevitableness of defeat.
Money is human happiness in abstracto; consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.
The prayer “Lead me not into temptation” means: “Let me not see who I am.
The will of the individual is dwarfed by the will of the species – for every suicide, there are thousands of unwilling births.
When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip unnapreciated and unenjoyed by was their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.
Life is known to be a process of combustion; intellect is the light produced by this process.
With young girls, nature seems to have in view what in the language of drama is called a “striking effect” as for a few years of her life, she is given a wealth of beauty and charm so that during those years she may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he takes care of her for the rest of her life.
We sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought.