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One has only to watch a girl playing with a child, dancing and sing with it the whole day ,and then ask oneself what, with the best will in the world, a man could do in her place.

Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.

For as nature has equipped the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs, the bull with horns and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped the power of  dissimulation as her her means of attack and defense, and has transformed into this gift all the  strength it has bestowed on man in the form of physical strength and the power of reasoning.

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.

Every moment or our life belongs to the present only for a moment; then it belongs forever to the past. Every evening we are poorer by a day. We would perhaps grow frantic at the sight of this ebbing away of our short span of time were we not secretly conscious in the profoundest depths of our being that we share in the inexhaustible well of eternity, out of which we can forever draw new life and renewed time.

...our life is to be regarded as a loan received from death, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.

As the biggest library if it is disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller if you have not thought it over for yourself.

But Gobineau was right; for man is the only animal which causes pain to others with no other object then causing pain.

Indeed, there is no surer sign of greatness than ignoring hurtful or insulting expressions by attributing them without further ado, like countless other errors, to the speakers lack of knowledge and thus merely taking note of them without feeling them.

...freedom of the press must be regarded as a permit to sell poison: poison of the mind and poison of the heart. For what cannot be put into the heads of the ignorant and credulous masses?

There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness. For training of men, as with animals, can be completely successful only in early youth.