Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence with the certainty of losing it at last.
Gaiety alone as it were is the hard cash of happiness everything else is just a promissory note.
I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of co...
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are by their very nature highly uncertain precarious ephemeral and subject to cha...
If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most Ill-adapted to its purpose in the world: for it is absurd to suppose that the endless affliction of whic...
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opi...
Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another but women are by nature enemies.
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.
Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
I observed once to Goethe ... that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself and he exists only in your head...
It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of so...
But it is common knowledge that religions don’t want conviction, on the basis of reasons, but faith, on the basis of revelation. And the capacity for faith is at its strongest in childhood: which is w...
Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes ennui of the higher ones.