If life – the craving for which is the very essence of our being – were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Life is a constant process of dying.
Human life must be some form of mistake.
Our life is a loan received from death with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.
Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.
For our improvement we need a mirror.
A reproach can only hurt if it hits the mark. Whoever knows that he does not deserve a reproach can treat it with contempt.
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
Pride is generally censured and decried, but mainly by those who have nothing to be proud of.
Everything that happens, happens of necessity.
To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.
That I could clamber to the frozen moon. And draw the ladder after me.
I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.
We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.