People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

Lawyers make nothing but confusion...A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.