Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.

There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.

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.

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.

The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation.