My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.

I must find a truth that is true for me.

Pain reconciles one to existence. Infinite resignation is that shirt in the old fable. The thread is spun with tears, bleached by tears, the shirt sewn in tears, but then it also gives better protection than iron. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself.

One is not unpopular because he uses peculiar expressions; that just so happens; such terms become a fad, and by and by everybody, down to the last simpleton, uses them. But a person who follows through an idea in his mind is, and always will be, essentially unpopular. That is why Socrates was unpopular, though he did not use any special terms, for to grasp and hold his 'ignorance' requires greater vital effort than understanding the whole of Hegel's philosophy.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

...there is one thing that all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise - an undivided will.

For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.