I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

However much we may feel for the misery of someone close to us, we always act with some artificiality in their presence. We hold-back from telling them everything we think, often because we do not genuinely mean what we say; or because we take a pleasure in their plight, thankful that we are not affected.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Actual philosophers... are commanders and law-givers: they say "thus it shall be!", it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical laborers, of all those who have subdued the past - they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer.

In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.

I love him who reserveth no share of spirit for himself, but wanteth to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walketh he as spirit over the bridge.