“Sensuality often hastens the "Growth of Love" so much that the roots remain weak and are easily torn up.”

“The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity.”

“Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light--what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality.”

“That which intoxicates, the sensually ecstatic, the sudden surprise, the urge to be profoundly stirred at any price -- dreadful tendencies!”

“As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former.”

“Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.”

“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.”