“There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.”

Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.

The prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.

It is an absolute and virtually divine perfection to know how to enjoy our being rightfully.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one’s own inner self.

The world is but a perpetual see-saw.

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One.

No pleasure has any savor for me without communication.

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.