"If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner."

"To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish."

"I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Time is that by which at every moment all things become as nothing in our hands, and thereby lose all their true value."

"We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack."

"Every fulfilled wish we wrest from the world is really like alms that keep the beggar alive today so that he can starve again tomorrow."

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite."

"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."

"[A]t bottom it is the same with traveling as with reading. How often do we complain that we cannot remember one thousandth part of what we read! In both cases, however, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the things we see and read make an impression on the mind before they are forgotten, and so contribute to its formation and nurture."

"Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost."

"The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning."

"To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them."

"The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value."

"Every society requires mutual accommodation and mutually agreeable temper; hence the larger it is, the duller."

"The Jews are the scum of the earth, but they are also great masters in lying."

"Ordinary people merely think how they shall 'spend' their time, a man of talent tries to 'use' it."

"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."

"Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom."

"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."

"Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the business man."

"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?"

"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."

"I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind."

"It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are."

"This consists in not taking a book into one's hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time - such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind."

"A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner, nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people."

"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible."

"There is nothing to be got in the world anywhere; privation and pain pervade it, and boredom lies in wait at every corner for those who have escaped them. Moreover, wickedness usually reigns, and folly does all the talking. Fate is cruel, and human beings are pathetic."

"Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat."

"NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life.preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation."

"It often happens that we blurt out things that may in some kind of way be harmful to us, but we are silent about things that may make us look ridiculous; because in this case effect follows very quickly on cause."

"With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy."

"God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism."

"The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped."

"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."

"The word of man is the most durable of all material."

"Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax."

"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."

"Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt."

"Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle."

"Qualsiasi uomo notevole, chiunque cioA non appartenga a quei 5/6 dell'umanitA dotati tanto miseramente dalla natura, rimarrA dopo i quarant'anni difficilmente esente da una certa traccia di misantropia."

"Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors."

"Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain."

"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."

"What keeps all living things busy and in motion is the striving to exist. But when existence is secured, they do not know what to do: that is why the second thing that sets them in motion is a striving to get rid of the burden of existence, not to feel it any longer, 'to kill time', i.e. to escape boredom."

"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."

"Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark."