A vain man can never be altogether rude. Desirous as he is of pleasing, he fashions his manners after those of others.

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

To live within limits. To want one thing. Or a few things very much and love them dearly. Cling to them, survey them from every angle. Become one with them - that is what makes the poet, the artist, the human being.

I consider him of no account who esteems himself just as the popular breath may chance to raise him.

It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

Painting and tattooing the body is a return to animalism.