Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight.

You lovers of knowledge! So what have you done out of your love of knowledge up to now? Have you already stolen and murdered so as to know how a thief and a murderer feels?

The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

On the heights it is warmer than those in the valley imagine.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty.