This life as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you and everything in the same series and sequence -- and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and this same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour glass of existence will be turned again and again -- and you with it, you dust of dust! |
This secret spoke Life herself unto me: "Behold," said she, "I am that which must ever surpass itself." |
Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed -- it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves. |
Those who are slow to know suppose that slowness is the essence of knowledge |
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler. |
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler. |
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler. |
Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations -- always darker, emptier, simpler than these. |
Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world. |
To become wise, one must "wish" to have certain experiences and run, as it were, into their gaping jaws. This, of course, is very dangerous; many a wise guy has been swallowed. |
To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult. |
To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write. |
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled -- because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance. |
To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity. |
To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both -- a philosopher. |