A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.

Such men alone are my readers, my proper readers, my preordained readers. Of what account are the rest? The rest are simply... humanity. One must be superior to humanity in power, in loftiness of soul- in contempt.

The disgust with dirt can be so great that it keeps us from cleaning ourselves--from "justifying" ourselves.

Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.

Kindliness, friendliness, the courtesy of the heart, are ever-flowing streams of non egoistic impulses, and have given far more powerful assistance to culture than even those much more famous demonstrations which are called pity, mercy, and self-sacrifice.

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