The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.

With sturdy shoulders, space stands opposing all its weight to nothingness. Where space is, there is being.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Heaping glowing coals on another person's head is usually misunderstood and comes to nothing because the other person knows just as well that he is in the right and has also given some thought on his own part to heaping coals.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

The life of the enemy . Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive.