In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

But nothing is better than a truth which appears not to have the semblance of truth. There is always something incomprehensible about the great heroic deeds performed by humanity because they rise so far beyond the mediocre measure of mere mortals; but it is always only because of the incredible feats that human beings have accomplished that humanity recovers its faith in itself.

Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.

Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophywith bellicose weapons and armor.

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.