Love is blind; friendship closes its eyes.

He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap

Do I advise you to love the neighbor? I suggest rather to escape from the neighbor and to love those who are the farthest away from you. Higher than the love for the neighbor is the love for the man who is distant and has still to come.

Whatever is gold does not glitter. A gentle radiance belongs to the noblest metal.

The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

Go through the moral demands...one by one and you will find that man could not live up to them; the intention is not that he should become more moral, but that he should feel as sinful as possible. If man had failed to find this feeling pleasant - why should he have engendered such an idea and adhered to it for so long?... Man was by every means to be made sinful and thereby become excited, animated, enlivened in general. To excite, animate, enliven at any price.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.