Physician, help yourself: thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help: that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.

A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents.

One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.

The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.

The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.

It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful.