Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.
People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.
To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.
Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.
Ordinary people merely think how they shall ‘spend’ their time; a man of talent tries to ‘use’ it.
To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.
The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
Where there is no love, a person’s faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.
We should be surprised that a matter that generally plays such an important part in the life of man has hitherto been almost entirely disregarded by philosophers, and lies before us as raw and untreated material.
The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.
To be alone is the fate of all great minds – a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it.
Time is that in which all things pass away.
The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.
Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live.
Astrology furnishes a splendid proof of the contemptible subjectivity of men. It refers the course of celestial bodies to the miserable ego: it establishes a connection between the comets in heaven and squabbles and rascalities on earth.
I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.