It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.
The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.
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.
We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate.
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.
The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.
Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
Women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.
The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.
Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.
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 chance.
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
I know of no more beautiful prayer than that which the Hindus of old used in closing: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.
A happy life is impos­si­ble; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do
If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.
We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.
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; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
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.
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.
If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid
There is something in us that is wiser than our head.
To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish
To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.
Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.
Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else.
The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.
The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
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.
Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.
Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
Our life is a loan received from death with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.
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.
Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.
If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.
What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.
A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .
The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.
The deep pain that is felt
at the death of every friendly soul
arises from the feeling that there is
in every individual something
which is inexpressible,
peculiar to him alone,
and is, therefore,
absolutely and irretrievably lost.
Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.
The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.
Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.
Life without pain has no meaning.
Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value.
All religions promise a reward beyond life, in eternity, for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.
Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.
Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
One should use common words to say uncommon things
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.
Life is a constant process of dying.
Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use
Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.
The present is the only reality and the only certainty.
Scoundrels are always sociable.
A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?
People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.
The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.
This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.
The reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment.
However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
What people commonly call Fate is, as a general rule, nothing but their own stupid and foolish conduct.
There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.
Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
If the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly-nay, they would go mad. And I may say, further, that a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.
Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.
There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man IS contributes more to his happiness than what he HAS.
Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.
Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.
Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and at the same time, all-powerful being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.
The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.
We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer
There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence ... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment.
Rudeness is better than any argument; it totally eclipses intellect.
Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
First the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.
It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.
With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.
Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.
Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.
Everybody's friend is nobody's.
Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.
I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.
Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.
Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging.
There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness ... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.
Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.
The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
Man may have the most excellent judgment in all other matters, and yet go wrong in those which concern himself; because here the will comes in and deranges the intellect at once. Therefore let a man take counsel of a friend. A doctor can cure everyone but himself; if he falls ill, he sends for a colleague.
Animals learn death first at the moment of death;...man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.
Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.
Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
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.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.
Because Christian morality leaves animals out of account, they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere 'things,' mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake
There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.
Whoever wants his judgment to be believed, should express it coolly and dispassionately; for all vehemence springs from the will. And so the judgment might be attributed to the will and not to knowledge, which by its nature is cold.
Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.
Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary excitement of the sense. Accordingly, we find that imagination is active just in proportion as our sense are not excited by external objects. A long period of solitude, whether in prison or in a sick room; quiet, twilight, darkness-these are the things that promote its activity; and under their influence it comes into play of itself.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.
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.
(Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.
Human existence is an error...it is bad today and every day it gets worse, until the worst happens.
The little incidents and accidents of every day fill us with emotion, anxiety, annoyance, passion, as long as they are close to us, when they appear so big, so important, so serious; but as soon as they are borne down the restless stream of time they lose what significance they had; we think no more of them and soon forget them altogether. They were big only because they were near.
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.
If a relationship is perfectly natural there will be a complete fusion of the happiness of both of you-owing to fellow-feeling and various other laws which govern our natures, this is, quite simply, the greatest happiness that can exist.
The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of
it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.
A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.
Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
Every truth passes through 3 stages before it is recognized 1)ridicule 2) opposition 3) accepted as self-evident.
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.
There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.
Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.
A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.
Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.
Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.
The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.
Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
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.
No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.
Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.
Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
For our improvement we need a mirror.
To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.
A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.
Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.
When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
No one can transcend their own individuality.
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
It is most important to allow the brain the full measure of sleep which is required to restore it; for sleep is to a man's whole nature what winding up is to a clock.
Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.
Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.
Human life must be some form of mistake.
It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.
universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents.
That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.
Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
Each day is a little life.
We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other
Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.
A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.
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 opinion, by prejudice.
If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.
Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.
What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others.
Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.
Time is that in which all things pass away.
Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.
Ist es an und fu? r sich absurd, das Nichtsein fu? r einUbel zu ? halten; da jedes Ubel wie jedes Gut das Dasein zur Voraussetzung hat, ja sogar das Bewusstsein. It is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness.
The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn't.
In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.
A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
To form a judgment intuitively is the privilege of few; authority and example lead the rest of the world. They see with the eyes of others, they hear with the ears of others. Therefore it is very easy to think as all the world now think; but to think as all the world will think thirty years hence is not in the power of every one.
Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.
For an act to be moral the intention must be based on compassion, not duty. We do something because we want to do it, because we feel we have to do it, not because we ought to do it. And even if our efforts fail - or we never even get to implement them - we are still moral because our motivation was based on compassion.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
Pride is an established conviction of one’s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.
If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?
Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.
I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Everything that happens, happens of necessity.
Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
Every nation criticizes every other one - and they are all correct.
True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
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.
What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.
Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.
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.
Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.
Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.
One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.
It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.
The truth can wait, for it lives a long life.
The eternal being..., as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.
The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?
Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
In order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.
I love looking at famous people. Because of the way they look. Because of the way photography makes them look famous.
Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.
Every new born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. It's fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are one being.
The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.
Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.
The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.
Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.
Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.
He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?
He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.
If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little.
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.
A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.
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.
Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.
All wanting comes from need, therefore from lack, therefore from suffering.
A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.
We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life
If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.
As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.
The beard, being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police - It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.
Money is human happiness in the abstract.
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place.
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.
Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.
Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.
Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious... and consequently the concentration of all desire
For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
[T]he appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.
It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.
A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it.
The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
How entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul !
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
Wir tappen im Labyrinth unsers Lebenswandels und im Dunkel unserer Forschungen umher: helleAugenblicke erleuchten dabei wie Blitze unsernWeg. We grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.
All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.
My body and my will are one.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
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.
Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately
Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.
Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.)
When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.
The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.
Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live.
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
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 first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to
them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.
Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world.
Consciousness makes the individual careful to maintain his own existence; and if this were not so, there would be no surety for the preservation of the species. From all this it is clear that individuality is not a form of perfection, but rather a limitation; and so to be freed from it is not loss but gain.
Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?
Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.
In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.
The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
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 someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.
Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.
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.
Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.
It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.
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.
Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.
Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.
If people insist that honor is dearer than life itself, what they really mean is that existence and well-being are as nothing compared with other people's opinions. Of course, this may be only an exaggerated way of stating the prosaic truth that reputation, that is, the opinion others have of us, is indispensable if we are to make any progress in the world.
Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.
There is more to be learnt from every page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher are taken together.
Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to - better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.
Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.
If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.
It is only when a man is alone that he is really free.
The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.
Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
Faith is like love, it cannot be forced. Therefore it is a dangerous operation if an attempt be made to introduce or bind it by state regulations; for, as the attempt to force love begets hatred, so also to compel religious belief produces rank unbelief.
Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.
Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.
Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.
There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.
Alle Befriedigung, oder was man gemeinhin Glu« ck nennt, ist eigentlich und wesentlich immer nur negativ und durchaus nie positiv. All satisfaction, or what iscommonlycalled happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of possessions.
Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.
It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.
Knowledge is to certain extent a second existence.
The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.