If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.

A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.

Everybody's friend is nobody's.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

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