Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

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.

He who knows himself to be profound endeavors to be clear; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd endeavors to be obscure.

What Europe owes to the Jews? - Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing of the nature both of the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness - and consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, now glows - perhaps glows out.

When the gratitude of many to one throws away all shame, we behold fame.

When a man is ill his very goodness is sickly.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it.