Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

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

Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.--Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.

What I really want from Music: That it be cheerful and profound like an afternoon in October.

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.

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.