Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.

Love, too, has to be learned.

Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.

That little hypocrites and half-crazed people dare to imagine that on their account the laws of nature are constantly broken; such an enhancement of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet Christianity owes its triumph to this pitiable flattery of personal vanity.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what there is to love in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeketh to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep — into the evil.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.