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Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
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It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
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For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
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All religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.
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Alles Wollen entspringt aus Bedürfnis, also aus Mangel, also aus Leiden.
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Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
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Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
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The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
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With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.
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Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
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The word of man is the most durable of all material.
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Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place.
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That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .
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Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
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Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
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A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
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Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.
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The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
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The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world 'God' is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word 'world'.
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Consciousness makes the individual careful to maintain his own existence; and if this were not so, there would be no surety for the preservation of the species. From all this it is clear that individuality is not a form of perfection, but rather a limitation; and so to be freed from it is not loss but gain.
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Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
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...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.
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What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
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The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.