Every person takes the limits for their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
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.
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is. -Arthur Schopenhauer.
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.
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.
Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
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.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.
Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
The man who sees two or three generations is like someone who sits in a conjurer's booth at a fair and sees the tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.
With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
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.
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
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.