What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

To do great things is difficult, but to command great things is more difficult.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

When one has much to put into them, a day has a hundred pockets.

Instinct. When the house burns one forgets even lunch. Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.

The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ''eternity''; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book -- what everyone else does not say in a book.

In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.

It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity.

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything --and one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ''productive'' man a yet higher species.

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a ''new heaven'' first found the power thereto in his own hell.