I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

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.

Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!

Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell.

Posthumous men-myself, for example-are not as well understood as timely ones, but we are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood-hence our authority.

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Some die too young, some die too old; the precept sounds strange, but die at the right age.