Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

Forgetting: that is a divine capacity. And whoever aspires to the heights and wants to fly must cast off much that is heavy and make himself light--I call it a divine capacity for lightness.

The beast in us must be[78] wheedled: ethic is necessary, that we may not be torn to pieces.

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

The reason adultery is immoral is that it might lead to marriage.