The question is not "To be or not to be," it is what we should be until we are not.

Future is everything that past has forgotten.

It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

With respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less, the more perfect one is.

Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?