The patient. The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait: and both without impatience: - they give no thought to the little people beneath them devoured by their impatience and their curiosity.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.

To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.

When I was twelve years old I thought up an odd trinity: namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Devil. My inference wasthat God, in contemplating himself, created the second person of the godhead; but that, in order to be able to contemplate himself, he had to contemplate, and thus to create, his opposite.--With this I began to do philosophy.

What a dissimilarity we see in walking, swimming, and flying. And yet it is one and the same motion: it is just that the load- bearing capacity of the earth differs from that of the water, and that that of the water differs from that of the air! Thus we should also learn to fly as thinkers--and not imagine that we are thereby becoming idle dreamers!