Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.
Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole,he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.
Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.
What we experience in dreams - assuming that we experience it often - belongs in the end just as much to the over-all economy of our soul as anything experienced "actually": we are richer or poorer on account of it.
He who is usually self-sufficient becomes exceptionally vain and keenly alive to fame and praise when he is physically ill. The more he loses himself the more he has to endeavor to regain his position by means of the opinion of others.
The hour when you say, "What does my happiness matter? It is poverty and filth, and a wretched complacency. Yet my happiness should justify existence itself!
Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time so that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.