What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are'.

But eternal liveliness is what counts: what does "eternal life" matter, or life at all?

Some die too young, some die too old; the precept sounds strange, but die at the right age.

Those people have no real interest in a science who only begin to get excited about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong, again and again- the reason being that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. Darwin forgot the mind (-that is English!): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind, one must need mind-one loses it when one no longer needs it.

At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.

In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.