Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

• 

  What moves man is the striving to exist; but when his existence is assured, he knows not what to do with it.

• 

  The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.

• 

  Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

• 

  To estimate how happy a man is, one should ask not what pleases him, but what troubles him.

• 

  Solitude is the lot of all outstanding minds.

• 

  What a man is in himself, what accompanies him when he is alone, what no one can give or take away, is more essential to him than everything he has or what he may be in the eyes of others.

All aphorisms