“How much of life had I missed simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?”

   "Unblinking eyes that look inward rather than out, as if he were protecting some inner treasure.“

   "From what stars have we dropped down to each other here?”

   "My illness belongs to the domain of my body, but it is not me. I am my illness and my body, but they are not me. Both must be overcome, if not physically, the metaphysically.“

   "Nietzsche had so little contact with other human beings that he spent an extraordinary amount of time in conversation with his own nervous system.”

   "Truth is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so!“

   "It is not the truth that is holy, but the search for one’s own truth!”

   "Hope? Hope is the final evil!“

   "There had to be a reservoir of complex thoughts in the brain, beyond consciousness bet on the alert, ready at any time to be mustered and marched onto the stage of conscious thinking.”

   "No one ever dies of fatal truths nowadays - there are too many antidotes.“

   "He claims that in order to discover truth, one must first know oneself fully. And to do that, one must remove oneself from one’s customary point of view, even from one’s own century and country - and then examine oneself from a distance.”

   "The taste of my death in my mouth gave me perspective and courage. It’s the courage to be myself that is the important thing.“

   "Personal suffering is a blessing - the training ground for facing the suffering of existence.”

   "In fact, much of our like may be lived by our instincts. Perhaps the conscious mental representations are afterthoughts - ideas thought after the dead to provide us with the illusion of power and control.“

   "If tension is the price of insight, so be it! I am rich enough to pay that price.”

   "You understand that my writing succeeds not because I am intelligent or scholarly. No, it’s because I have the daring, the willingness, to detach myself from the comfort of the heard and to face strong and evil inclinations. Inquiry and science start with disbelief. Yet disbelief is inherently stressful! Only the strong can tolerate it. Do you know the real question for a thinker is? The real question is: how much truth can I stand? It is no occupation for those of your patients who wish to eliminate stress, to live the tranquil life.“

   "Doesn’t one have responsibility even for one’s own forgetfulness.”

   "Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you will always find despair.“

   "For one can never really be helped by another; one must find the strength to help oneself.”

   "Should we not create - should we not become- before we reproduce? Our responsibility to life is to create a higher, not to reproduce the lower. Nothing must interfere with the development of the hero inside of you.“

   ” It is easier, far easier, to obey another than to command oneself.“

   "Those who wish for peace of soul and happiness must believe and embrace faith, while those who wish to pursue the truth must forsake peace of mind and devote their life to inquiry.”

   "You must learn to acknowledge your life and to have the courage to say, Thus I chose it! The spirit of man is constructed out of his choices.“

   "If you choose to be one of those few who partake of the pleasure of growth and the exhilaration of godless freedom, then you must prepare yourself for the greatest pain. They are bound together and cannot be experienced apart! If you want less pain, then you must shrink and forgo the highest pleasure.”

   "Don’t you see that the problem is not that you feel discomfort? What importance is tension or pressure in your chest? Who ever promised you comfort? So you sleep poorly! So? Who ever promised you good sleep? No, the problem is that you have discomfort about the wrong things.“

   "I comprehend my misery and I welcome it.”

   "The fact that the will cannot will backwards does not mean the will is impotent! Because God is dead - that does not mean existence has no purpose! Because death comes - that does not mean that life has no value.“

   "The best truths, he always said, were bloody truths, ripped out of one’s own life experience.”

   "Be a man and do not follow me - but yourself! But yourself!“

   "Growth is more important than comfort.”

   "Maybe living safely is dangerous. Dangerous and deadly.“

   "Sometimes I gaze so far into life that I suddenly look around and see that no one has accompanied me, and that my sole companion is time.”

   "Could there be such a thing as an active forgetting - forgetting something not because it is unimportant, but because it is too important.“

   "The time will come when men will cease to fear knowledge, will no longer disguise weakness as moral law, will find the courage to break the bond of thou shalt. Then shall men hunger for my living wisdom. Then shall men need my guidance to an honest life, a life of disbelief and discovery. A life of overcoming. Of lust overcome. And what greater lust than the lust to submit?”

   "I dream of love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.“

   "If I knew the answer, why would I ask? To avoid knowing your own answer.”

   "Yes, eternal recurrence means that every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity. And it is the same for every action not made, every stillborn thought, un-lived through all eternity. And the unheeded voice of you conscience will cry out to you forever.“

   "I teach that life should never be modified or squelched, because of the promise of some other hind of life in the future. What is immortal is this life, this moment. There is no afterlife, no goal toward which this life points, no apocalyptic tribunal or judgement. This moment exists forever, and you, alone, are your only audience.”

   "Nothing is everything! In order to grow strong you must first sink your roots into nothingness and learn to face you loneliest loneliness.“

   "First to will that which is necessary and then to love that which is willed.”

   "If we cannot embrace out own aloneness, we will simply use the other as a shield against isolation. Only when one can live like the eagle - with no audience whatsoever - can one turn to another in love.“

“Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth”

   "But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that it arises out of experience.“

   "No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going.”

   "And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world and not an enemy of it.“

   "We always condemn most in others that which we most fear in ourselves.”

“Human nature is such that if two people listen, each feels only half responsible for understanding.”

   "You must listen as though you were entirely alone and hole yourself accountable for everything that is said.“

   "The difficulty with theory, however, is that it is endless.”

   "All thoughts, whether ennobling or debasing, are mutable and impermanent.“

   "So if you can honestly say, "I don’t understand”, you understand a great deal!“

   "Unless you are bothered or worried by something it is better not to ask questions, for there is no end to them.”

   "What is obstructing realization? Nothing but your own halfhearted desire for truth.“

   "Wake up and throw your lives to the struggle.”

“I want it now is the disease of modern society.”

   "Some of these meanings would not become apparent until years after the lessons had been given and understanding reached only after all the proper, necessary, steps were lived through and the experiences assimilated into my heart.“

   "He knew that all things were possible; he did not need to know why.”

   "Naming is a dead end that deludes the namer into believing that there is nothing else to learn.“

   "When we try hard to live the feeling rather than base it on the prejudice of past experiences, nothing will ever be the same.”

   "Boredom is only for people who do not know themselves or the wonders of themselves.“

   "You must forget you have a past, forget all you have ever learned, and who you are, then you will be empty and ready to listen purely.”

   "The Earth is also a place where all truth is manifest, a crucible where one can check the validity of what he believes to be true.“

   "They come to the wilderness as aliens, and like a disease they drive the very animals from the forests. They find freedom here but cannot confront that freedom. They find peace and solitude here, but choose to know it not. They leave behind pockets of destruction and the litter of society as a flag, a monument, that banners their conquering. Yet they can never conquer Creation, for in conquering the wilderness, they must conquer themselves. To conquer themselves, they find themselves, and in the discovery, cannot and will not conquer wilderness.”

   "We do things silently, for our rewards will always follow us silently.“

   "You must accept what that path teaches and resolve yourself to follow that path, even at the sacrifice of all things. If you choose to follow that path, you must dedicate yourself to its challenges, its pain, and its self-sacrifices. Once you decide to go, there can be no turning back, for a man who abandons his Vision is living death.”

   "Search you heart and know that this is what you want more than life. Know that this path will mean hardship, asceticism, loneliness, and the abandoning of all that modern society teaches. Know that you will lose friends, and that you will never return to where you have been. Know that once you choose to walk this path, you will walk it forever, or perish. Decide if you are willing to dedicate the rest of you r life to this path, and know that there is no room on this path for you. The you that you are dies, and you become a bridge to be used by the Creator and Creation. You, you wants and needs, must always become second to that path, for you cannot serve the path and yourself.“

“It is impossible to become free from one influence without becoming subject to another. The whole thing, all work on oneself, consists in choosing the influence to which you wish to subject yourself, and actually falling under this influence.”

   "The acquisition or transmission of true knowledge demands great labor and great effort both of him who receives and of him who gives.“

   "Knowledge cannot be given by force to anyone.”

   "It is by overcoming obstacles that a man develops those qualities he needs.“

   "But even the clearest understanding of his possibilities will not bring man any nearer to their realization. In order to realize there possibilities he must have a very strong desire for liberation and be willing to sacrifice everything, to risk everything, for the sake of their liberation.”

   "If a man could feel all his contradictions he would feel what he really is.“

   "If a man understands that he is asleep and if he wishes to awake, then everything that helps him to awake will be good and everything that hinders him, everything that prolongs his sleep, will be evil.”

   "Essence in a man is what is his own. Personality in man is what is not his own.“

   "Essence has more chances of development in men who live nearer to nature in difficult conditions of constant struggle and danger.”

   "Every effort a man makes increases the demands made upon him. So long as a man has not made any serious efforts the demands made upon him are very small, but his efforts immediately increase the demands made upon him.“

   "Nothing that a man did yesterday excuses him today.”

   "Only by experiencing discomfort can a man really observe himself.“

   "I realized in this place that people feared silence more than anything else, that our tendency to talk arises from self-defense and is always based upon a reluctance to see something, a reluctance to confess something to oneself.”