The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you - is to die soon.

Learn to see - accustoming the eye to calm, to patience, to letting-things-come-to-it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the question on all sides.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle.

I enquire now as to the genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. 2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

The gilded sheath of pity sometimes covers the dagger of envy.