Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

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.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

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

Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

There is an Arabic writer who wrote philosophy and poetry and who brought all religions and all the world together.

My father lived by the philosophy, 'Be yourself, because everyone else is taken,' and he made sure I did, too. Whatever I wanted to do, he supported me. I don't mean that I was spoilt - he didn't believe in material gifts - but he watched my back while I worked to achieve things.

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Leisure is the mother of Philosophy

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.