The ability to suffer is a small matter - weak women and even slaves can acheive virtuosity in that.

The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.

The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

A woman's pity, which is talkative, carries the sick person's bed to the public marketplace.

I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.

Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.

To our strongest impulse, to the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience yields.