The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.

Women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

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

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.