One should not wish to enjoy where one does not give joy.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.

Creation is the great redemption from suffering and all life's growing light. But the creator must be suffering if needed and accept much change.

Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

... hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered.