I have, I believe, the courage to doubt everything; I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have the courage to acknowledge anything, the courage to possess, to own anything.
It is not the path which is the difficulty; rather, it is the difficulty which is the path.
Future is everything that past has forgotten.
Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.
Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.
Don’t forget to love yourself.
How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won’t be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.
Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth – look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.
There can be no faith without risk.
What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the worst misfortune is not to understand what a misfortune it is.
Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.
Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.
At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
One can advise comfortably from a safe port.
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.
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.