The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you - is to die soon.

There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.

There is a lake that one day refused to flow away and threw up a dam at the place where it had before flowed out and since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very act of renunciation provides us with the strength to bear it ; perhaps man will rise ever higher and higher when he no longer flows out into a God.

One should adpot only those situations in which one is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand--or escape.

Great men's errors are to be venerated as more fruitful than little men's truths.

The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things.

You must be born for your physician, otherwise you are bound to perish because of your physician.