Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

To live alone is the fate of all great souls.

Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.

Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.

Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex.

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.

A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.

The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Arthur's Laws of Love: (1) People to whom you are attracted invariably think you remind them of someone else. (2) The love letter you finally got the courage to send will be delayed in the mail long enough for you to make a fool of yourself in person.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost care and forethought must be exercised as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.

The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.

Arthur Schopenhauer Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.

It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

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

There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.

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.

A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.

People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome --to be got over.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, ''Lighthouses'' as the poet said ''erected in the sea of time.'' They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

The present is the only reality and the only certainty.

Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.

It is with trifles and when he is off guard that a man best reveals his character.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

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

Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and sleep a little dearth.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.