I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people.

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.

Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.

No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.

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.