Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.

It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.

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

I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.