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

Qualsiasi uomo notevole, chiunque cioè non appartenga a quei 5/6 dell'umanità dotati tanto miseramente dalla natura, rimarrà dopo i quarant'anni difficilmente esente da una certa traccia di misantropia.

In its death throes, we see religion clinging to morality, whose mother it would like to pretend to be. In vain! – genuine morality is dependent on no religion, although religion sanctions and thereby sustains it.

Throughout the entire Christian era theism has lain like an incubus on all intellectual, especially philosophical endeavor and has prevented or stunted all progress; and when anyone has possessed the rare elasticity of mind which alone can slip free of these fetters, his writings have been burned and sometimes their author with them, as happened to Bruno and Vanini.

To measure a man's happiness only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile as to try and express a fraction which shall have a numerator but no denominator.

In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence."―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171

Un hombre puede ser él mismo mientras esté solo; si no ama la soledad, no amará la libertad; porque sólo cuando se está solo se es realmente libre.

El dolor no brota de no tener. Brota de querer tener y sin embargo no tener. El querer tener es la conditio sine qua non para que el dolor sea eficaz.

The highest, i.e., the most general concepts, are the poorest; ultimately these are just empty shells, as, e.g., being, essence, thing, becoming, ect. - incidentally, whatever could philosophical systems produce when they are merely spun out of these same concepts and have as their matter only such empty shells of thought? They must be infinitely empty and poor, and therefore, turn out to be tedious and suffocating.