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

To be alone is the fate of all great minds—a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.

The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.

Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.