Life's neither a good nor an evil: it's a field for good and evil.

Do not grudge your brother his rest. He has at last become free, safe and immortal, and ranges joyous through the boundless heavens; he has left this low-lying region and has soared upwards to that place which receives in its happy bosom the souls set free from the chains of matter. Your brother has not lost the light of day, but has obtained a more enduring light. He has not left us, but has gone on before.

Nature has made us passive, and to suffer is our lot. While we are in the flesh every man has his chain and his clog; only it is looser and lighter to one man than to another, and he is more at ease who takes it up and carries it than he who drags it.

I would rather be sick than idle.

Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor.

Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.

The man who thinks only of his own generation is born for few.