“It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.”

“I am a citizen of the world.”

“A philosopher named Aristippus, who had quite willingly sucked up to Dionysus and won himself a spot at his court, saw Diogenes cooking lentils for a meal. "If you would only learn to compliment Di...”

“Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.”

“Poverty is a virtue which one can teach oneself.”

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn't hurt anybody's feelings?”

“This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with th...”

“The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.”

“The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men”

“I do not snivel that snivel the world over,That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.”

“I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness-...”

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could ...”

“You have succeeded in life when all you really WANT is only what you really NEED.”

“There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.”

“I find it odd- the greed of mankind. People only like you for as long as they perceive they can get what they want from you. Or for as long as they perceive you are who they want you to be. But I l...”