Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task... for the question is this : How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.

Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right -- especially when one is right.

Assuming that we have trained our imagination to denounce the past, we will not suffer much from unfulfilled wishes.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.

What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

Such a man as instinctively feeds on pure ambrosia and leaves alone the indigestible in things.

It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.

You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

I am really very, very tired of everything - more than tired.

Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.

It is the evening that questions thus from within me.