Pitch-black winter nights live in my bones.

Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong, again and again- the reason being that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. Darwin forgot the mind (-that is English!): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind, one must need mind-one loses it when one no longer needs it.

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.

Childhood and youth are ends in themselves, not stages.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.