Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
Success has always been a great liar.
What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.
Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.
Fear is the mother of morality.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.
Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.
I would believe only in a god that knows how to dance.
When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way - before one began.
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
In music the passions enjoy themselves.
When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epoch, it is the rule.
To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.
Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.