You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.
Most of our suffering lies in retrospect or anticipation.
To be happy one must be as ignorant as youth, youth thinks that willing and striving are joys – it does not yet discover the unending character of desire and the fruitless of fulfillment, It does not yet see the inevitableness of defeat.
The prayer “Lead me not into temptation” means: “Let me not see who I am.
The will of the individual is dwarfed by the will of the species – for every suicide, there are thousands of unwilling births.
When, at the end of their lives, most men look back they will find that they have lived throughout ad interim. They will be surprised to see that the very thing they allowed to slip unnapreciated and unenjoyed by was their life. And so a man, having been duped by hope, dances into the arms of death.
Life is known to be a process of combustion; intellect is the light produced by this process.
With young girls, nature seems to have in view what in the language of drama is called a “striking effect” as for a few years of her life, she is given a wealth of beauty and charm so that during those years she may capture the fancy of some man to such a degree that he takes care of her for the rest of her life.
We sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought.
Were I a King, my prime command would be – Leave me alone.
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind.
The truest fame, the fame that comes after death, is never heard of by its recipient; and yet he is called a happy man. His happiness lay both in the possession of those great qualities which won him fame, and in the opportunity that was granted him of developing them–the leisure he had to act as he pleased, to dedicate himself to his favorite pursuits. It is only work done from the heart that ever gains the laurel.
Nothing is without a reason why it is rather than it is not.
Even trees must be shaken by the wind, if they are to thrive.
It is not ferocity but cunning that strikes fear into the heart and forebodes danger; so true it is that the human brain is a more terrible weapon than the lion’s paw.
Whatever one may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is the moment... falling asleep, and the unhappiest moment of the unhappy that of his awaking.
Every life history is the history of suffering.
The perverse, obtuse, wicked biped race.
The theoretical philosopher transforms life into ideas. The practical philosopher transforms ideas into life; he acts, therefore, in a thoroughly reasonable manner; he is consistent, regular, deliberate; he is never hasty or passionate; he never allows himself to be influenced by the impression of the moment.
Man is the dream of a shadow.
Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it is; for ever after, that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span of time ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our being we are secretly conscious of our share in the exhaustible spring of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again.