There are the spiritually consumptive ones: hardly are they born when they begin to die, and long for doctrines of lassitude and renunciation.

Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared — this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].