“How COULD they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes!”

“But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.”

“I and me are always too deeply in conversation: how could I endure it,if there were not a friend?The friend of the hermit is always the third one: the third one is the float which prevents the conversation of the two from sinking into the depth.”

“The time is gone when mere accidents could still happen to me; and what could still come to me now that was not mine already? What returns, what finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents.”

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

“Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall.”