Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.
I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant’s works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?
There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
If there is anything in the world that can really be called a mans property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.
Not to go to the theater is like making one’s toilet without a mirror.
Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest.
Man shows his character best in trifles.
For, as you know, religions are like glow-worms; they shine only when it is dark.
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.