If you buy the why, the how is infinitely bearable

A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the worldthat we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.

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.

One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive.