Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
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... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)
One should use common words to say uncommon things
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first.
Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
Life is a constant process of dying.
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
Marrying means to halve one's rights and double one's duties
I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
The world is my idea
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people. There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness.
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.
Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.
He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.
I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.
We seldom think of what we have, but always of what we lack.
There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?
Rascals are always sociable, and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others company.
If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.
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.
Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time; a man of talent tries to 'use' it.
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.
That I could clamber to the frozen moon. And draw the ladder after me.
To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.
There is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.
Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.
Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
Each day is a little life.
For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?
For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.
Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.
We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
Buying books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.
Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
Truth is most beautiful undraped.
No rose without a thorn. Yes, but many a thorn without a rose.
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.
Money is human happiness in the abstract; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in the concrete, sets his whole heart on money.
...in the end every one stands alone, and the important thing is who it is that stands alone.
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.
If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.
Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.
Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
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.
For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.
Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost.
Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
Every Man Mistakes the Limits of His Vision For The Limits Of The World..
If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom.
