It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

A noble soul is not the one that can manage the highest flights but the one that rises very little and falls very little but always dwells in a free, resplendent atmosphere and altitude.

Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'

He who has always spared himself much will in the end become sickly of so much consideration. Praised be what hardens!

Beggars should be entirely abolished! Truly, it is annoying to give to them and annoying not to give to them.

The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for.

All good things were formerly bad things; every original sin has turned into an original virtue.