The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.

A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish. But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves- and who want to go where I want to go.

Do I advise you to love the neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from the neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for the neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.

The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not before hand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

For the purpose of knowledge we must know how to make use of the inward current which draws us towards a thing, and also of the current which after a time draws us away from it.