This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

We have to learn how to come out of unclean situations cleaner than we were, and even how to wash ourselves with dirty water whenwe need to.

The good-they cannot create; they are always the beginning of the end.

Men inadvertently comport themselves with nobility when they have grown accustomed to wanting nothing from others and always giving to them.

Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me.