Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?
Scoundrels are always sociable.
Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.
Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.
All our wanting comes from needs, thus we continiously suffer. The intellect teaches free will, free from suffering.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
It is only when a man is alone that he is really free.
What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
We should comfort ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages-stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.
It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
No one can transcend their own individuality.
For where did Dante take the material of his hell but from our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.
All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.
Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other.
Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.