You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.

Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.

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

Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.

universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.