To have lost what cannot be missed is clearly no evil.
Caci avutia este ca apa sarata: cu cat bei cu atat ti-e mai este. La fel este si gloria.
Sometimes I speak to men and women just as a little girl speaks to her doll. She knows, of course, that the doll does not understand her, but she creates for herself the joy of communication through a pleasant and conscious self-deception.
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
If now the all-mother sends forth her children without protection to a thousand threatening dangers, this can only be because she knows that if they fall they fall back into her womb, where they are safe; therefore their fall is a mere jest.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful.
The conviction is well founded, which the sight of noble conduct calls forth, that the spirit of love... can never pass away and become nothing.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Just remember, once you’re over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else.
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
To live alone is the fate of all great souls.