"The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness."

"There is an underlying unity in all things."

"A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone."

"Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will."

"Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes."

"No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject."

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."

"The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for."

"After your death you will be what you were before your birth."

"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another's thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid."

"Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own."

"Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another."

"Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies."

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."

"So if you have to live amongst men, you must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be: and all you should strive to do is to make use of this character in such a way as its kind and nature permit, rather than to hope for any alteration in it, or to condemn it off-hand for what it is. This is the true sense of the maxim--Live and let live. That, however, is a task which is difficult in proportion as it is right; and he is a happy man who can once for all avoid having to do with a great many of his fellow creatures."

"In general, nine-tenths of our happiness depends on our health alone."

"To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach."

"Music is the melody whose text is the world."

"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 tree main bulwarks of defence against new thoughts: to pay no heed, to give no credence, and finally to assert that it had already long existed."

"People's envy shows how unhappy they feel, their constant attention to the doings of others how bored they are."

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

"Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity."

"The true basis and propaedeutic for all knowledge of human nature is the persuasion that a man's actions are, essentially and as a whole, not directed by his reason and its designs; so that no one becomes this or that because he wants to, though he want to never so much, but that his conduct proceeds from his inborn and inalterable character, is narrowly and in particulars determined by motivation, and is thus necessarily the product of these two factors."

"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."

"Life is a constant process of dying."

"Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own."

"Compassion is the basis of morality."

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

"Pride ... is the direct appreciation of oneself."

"A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it."

"Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head."

"Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people."

"You can do what you will: but at each given moment of your life you can will only one determined thing and by no means anything other than this one."

"If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary...If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way."

"If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the miseries of boredom."

"The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it."

"Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure."

"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed in the second it is opposed in the third it is regarded as self-evident."

"Health so far outweighs all external goods that a healthy beggars is truly more fortunate than a king in poor health."

"The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time."

"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."

"After your death, you will be what you were before your birth."

"Truth that is naked is the most beautiful."

"If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."

"It is in trifles and when he is off his guard that a man best shows his character."

"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."

"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."

"Genius is among other minds what the carbuncle is among gemstones, it radiates its own light while the others only reflect what they receive."