The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.

Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.

Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.

Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.