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.

The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.

[T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror.

Our life is a loan received from death with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

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

Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.