If ye would go up high, then use your own legs! Do not get yourselves carried aloft; do not seat yourselves on other people's backs and heads!

What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

All great men are play actors of their own ideal.

Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

Men after death ... are understood worse than men of the moment, but heard better.

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.