Imitation and custom are the spring of almost all human action. The cause of it is that men fight shy of all and any sort of reflection, and very properly mistrust their own discernment. At the same time this remarkably strong imitative instinct.
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.
Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.
El mundo es el infierno, y los hombres se dividen en almas atormentadas y diablos atormentadores”.
Your University professors are bound to preach optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories.
We must not even evade it, as the Indians do, by myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahman, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell, but from this, our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it. And when, on the other hand, he came to the task of describing heaven and its delight, he had an insurmountable difficulty before him, for our world affords no materials at all for this.
This again, tallies with what Goethe says in Wilhelm Meister: The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use, finds his greatest happiness in using it.
Everyone appears mad who recognizes the eternal ideas in fleeting things.
But to be in possession of undisturbed leisure, is far from being the common lot; nay, it is something alien to human nature, for the ordinary man’s destiny is to spend life in procuring what is necessary for the subsistence of himself and his family;.