The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

The manner in which the hours of freedom are spent determines, no less than labor and war, the moral worth of a nation.

They think that nothing will happen because they have closed their doors, and they do not know that it is in the soul that things always happen, and that the world does not end at their housedoor.

Justice is the very last thing of all wherewith the universe concerns itself. It is equilibrium that absorbs its attention.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.

(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")