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!

It is not the strengths, but the durations of great sentiments that make great men.

In Russia there is an emigration of intelligence: émigrés cross the frontier in order to read and to write good books. But in doing so they contribute to making their fatherland, abandoned by spirit, into the gaping jaws of Asia that would like to swallow our little Europe.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good - the atavism of an old ideal.

In order for once to get a glimpse of our European morality from a distance, in order to compare it with other earlier or future moralities, one must do as the traveller who wants to know the height of the towers of a city: he leaves the city.

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?

The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.