The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything -and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.

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!

The most fatal seductive lie that has yet existed.

You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil.

The beauty of nature, like every other kind of beauty, is quite jealous; it demands that one serve it alone.

He is wholly without envy, but there is not merit therein: for he wants to conquer a land which no one yet possessed and hardly any one has ever seen.