Whoever wants to set a good example must add a grain of foolishness to his virtue: then others can imitate and yet at the same time surpass the one they imitate-which human beings love to do.
Every extension of knowledge arises from making the conscious the unconscious.
Courage is the best slayer – courage which attacketh, for in every attack there is the sound of triumph.
It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage; which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.
We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space – how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image!
Only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom.
Our body is simply a social structure made of many souls.
The good four. Honest with ourselves and with whatever is friend to us; courageous toward the enemy; generous toward the vanquished; polite-always that is how the four cardinal virtues want us.
Everything in woman hath a solution. It is called pregnancy.
A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.
The idealist is incorrigible: if he is thrown out of his heaven he makes an ideal of his hell.
That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.
Curiosity creeps into the houses of the unfortunate and the needy under the name of duty or of pity.
We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.
Youth is an unpleasant period; for then it is not possible or not prudent to be productive in any sense whatsoever.
He who cannot command himself should obey. And many can command themselves, but much is still lacking before they can obey themselves.
Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.
He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens!
Death. The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity- and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive.
Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.