It is only great pain--that slow, sustained pain that takes its time, in which we are, as it were, burned with smoldering green firewood--that forces us philosophers to sink to our ultimate profundity and to do away with all the trust, everything good-natured, veil-imposing, mild and middling, on which we may have previously based our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us 'better'--but I know that it makes us deeper.

I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.

A physician who treated me as a nervous case for a while said in the end "No! It is not a matter of your nerves; it is I who am nervous".

One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.

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

All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?