To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same tim… - Arthur Schopenhauer

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

People are often reproached because their desires are directed mainly to money and they are fonder of it than of anything else. Yet it is natural and even inevitable for them to love that which, as an untiring Proteus, is ready at any moment to convert itself into the particular object of our fickle desires and manifold needs. Thus every other blessing can satisfy only one desire and one need; for instance, food is good only to the hungry, wine only for the healthy, medicine for the sick, a fur coat for winter, women for youth, and so on. Consequently, all these are only … relatively good. Money alone is the absolutely good thing because it meets not merely one need in concreto, but needs generally in abstracto.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.