Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed. -In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

When death brings at last the desired forgetfulness, it abolishes life and being together, and sets the seal on the knowledge that "being" is merely a continual "has been," a thing that lives by denying and destroying and contradicting itself.

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.

An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.