Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?

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

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.

Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious.

What the sense feeleth, what the spirit discerneth, hath never its end in itself. But sense and spirit would fain persuade thee that they are the end of all things: so vain are they.