Man is doomed either squander his youth, which is the only time he has to store provisions for the coming years and provide for his own well-being, or to spend his youth procuring pleasures in advance for that time of life when he will be too old to enjoy them.

Death is not evil, for it frees man from all ills and takes away his desires along with desire's rewards.

Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.

It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

The world laughs at things it would really prefer to admire, and like Aesop's fox it criticizes things it covets.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

Boredom is the most sublime of all human emotions because it expresses the fact that the human spirit, in a certain sense, is greater than the entire universe. Boredom is an expression of a profound despair at not finding anything that can satisfy the soul's boundless needs.