Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
I would have perished had I not perished.
If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.
What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.
The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.
I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world.
Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.
In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.
My scholarly expectation is then that I may succeed in becoming clever in philosophy in spite of my stupidity.
Whoever has the world’s treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise.
Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.
The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who’s right often has to stand alone.
Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.
The person who praises God is on the tracks of justice.
I am so stupid that I cannot understand philosophy; the antithesis of this is that philosophy is so clever that it cannot comprehend my stupidity. These antitheses are mediated in a higher unity; in our common stupidity.
The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.
Men are not on such intimate terms with the sublime that they really can believe in it.
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.