The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

It was Christianity, with its heartfelt resentment against life, that first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the essential fact of our life.

I need solitude, which is to say, recovery, return to my self, the breath of a free, light, playful air.

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!

If an architect wants to strengthen a decrepit arch, he increases the load laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.

But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.

It is possible that the production of genius is reserved to a limited period of mankind's history.