“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?

The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many.

Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

Meaning and morality of one’s life come from within oneself.

Women make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

Water is the softest thing, yet it can penetrate mountains and earth. This shows clearly the principle of softness overcoming hardness.

Be a mirror, absorb everything around you and still remain the same.

You always become the thing you fight the most.

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over.