Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task... for the question is this : How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.

Principle of "Christian love": it insists upon being well paid in the end.

The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.

He who has attained intellectual emancipation to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.

When one thinks profusely and cleverly, not only his face but his body too takes on a clever appearance.

He who does not lie does not know what truth is.