Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting.

No skill or art is needed to grow old; the trick is to endure it.

Is it not enough that we cannot make one another happy, must we also rob one another of the pleasures that any heart may permit itself now and then? And name me a person who in a bad mood will be decent enough to hide it, to bear it alone, without destroying the joy around him. Is it not rather an inner dissatisfaction with our own unworthiness, a dislike of ourselves that is always associated with envy aggravated by foolish conceit? We see people happy and not made happy by us, and that is unbearable.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

He who is resolute conquers grief.

Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look around.

Our passions are the true phoenixes; when the old one is burnt out, a new one rises from its ashes.