“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

“Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.”

“As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge.”

“Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.”

“Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives 'unphilosophically' and 'unwisely,' above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game.”

“Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.”

“In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, over laden with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power - until they are reflections of his perfections”