Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape.
Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.
The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.
Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.
One should not go into churches if one wants to breathe pure air.
The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in support of this theory.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.
One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.
He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.
The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.
Our vanity desires that what we do best should be considered what is hardest for us.
The most fatal seductive lie that has yet existed.
Your god is dead and only the ignorant weep. And if you claim there is a hell, then we shall meet there!
It is within your power to see that all you have experienced, trials, errors, faults, deceptions, passions, your love and your hope, shall be merged wholly in your aim.
Those that achieve anything that looks beyond the vision and thinking of their peers provoke jealousy and hatred disguised as the ordinary.
We come to recognize that playfulness, as a philosophical stance, can be very serious indeed; and moreover, that it possesses an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule and hostility in those among us who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint.
To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both – a philosopher.
Strideth over all mountains, and laugheth at all tragedies.
A heart full of courage and cheerfulness needs a little danger from time to time, or the world gets unbearable.
Marriage marks the end of many short follies – being one long stupidity.