...no pain has been or shall be able to tempt me into giving false testimony about life as I recognize it.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?

There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.

In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.