Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.

As soon as we climb higher than those who had at one time admired us, we appear to them as though we have sunken and fallen down:for, in any event, they had at one time supposed that they were with us (even if it were through us) on the heights.

You gave him an opportunity of showing greatness of character and he did not seize it. He will never forgive you for that.

...If I continued to harbour any hope for music it lay in the expectation that a musician might come who was sufficiently bold, subtle, malicious, southerly, superhealthy to confront that music and in an immortal fashion take revenge on it.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.