We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth

Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.

He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.