The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.

This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.

For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.