The good four. Honest with ourselves and with whatever is friend to us; courageous toward the enemy; generous toward the vanquished; polite-always that is how the four cardinal virtues want us.
Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.
How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.
Whoever is related to me in the height of his aspirations will experience veritable ecstasies of learning; for I come from heights that no bird ever reached in its flight, I know abysses into which no foot ever strayed.
My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.
What a dissimilarity we see in walking, swimming, and flying. And yet it is one and the same motion: it is just that the load- bearing capacity of the earth differs from that of the water, and that that of the water differs from that of the air! Thus we should also learn to fly as thinkers--and not imagine that we are thereby becoming idle dreamers!
I want to know whether you are a person devoted to creating or to exchanging in some respect or other: as a creator you belong tothe free, as an exchanger you are their slave and instrument.