At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.

The way to transmute your iron duty into gold in everyone's eyes is this: always deliver more than you promise.

One pays dearly for being immortal: one must die many times during his life.

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust.