Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.

...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.

When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

It is not true that the heart wears out - but the body creates this illusion.