Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.

To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society.

Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.

And when your soul becometh great, then doth it become haughty, and in your sublimity there is wickedness.

I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.