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.

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.

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.

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

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

Not to go to the theater is like making one's toilet without a mirror.