“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

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

He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.

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

Truth is most beautiful undraped.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

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

Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are the tormented souls.

Treat a work of art like a prince; let it speak to you first.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

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

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

One should use common words to say uncommon things.

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

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

Wealth is like seawater; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of fame.

A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote. A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat. So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.

The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.

That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.

Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he’s in love with her.

A man may go to heaven with half the pains it cost him to purchase hell.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.