Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!

You want to be paid as well, you virtuous! You want reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your today?

Then is what you see through this window onto the world so lovely that you have no desire whatsoever to look out through any other window, and that you even make an attempt to prevent others from doing so?

It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

The thousand mysteries around us would not trouble but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts.

Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes.