Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.)

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.

If God made this world, then i would not want to be the God. It is full of misery and distress that it breaks my heart.

It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.

A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

Ist es an und fu? r sich absurd, das Nichtsein fu? r einUbel zu ? halten; da jedes Ubel wie jedes Gut das Dasein zur Voraussetzung hat, ja sogar das Bewusstsein. It is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness.