"The noble Nazarene ... who raged against "the world," against the philistinism, the halfheartedness, the lack of ideals—if he had guessed that he was forging a weapon for the hands of exactly "this world"—he who sensed the misfortune of humanity so deeply that he didn't find any other solution to its enigma than to entirely reject and turn his back on all that is earthly, would see his name dragged into the service of an intense philistine optimism."

“The Jesuit principle: withdrawal from the world—in order to act on the world—was frequently also the principle of genius.”

“Truth and beauty ... yield themselves only to whoever surrenders to them—as to a rescuer.”

“The egotism of wisdom: to burn all that is pettily, painfully, stupidly selfish in the fire of love of spiritual vision and freedom.”

“Everything great has already been said. But the person who knows how to stimulate his soul with the magnificence of it is always something new.”

“Sometimes it is hard to avoid a certain feeling of sadness: when realizing that everything sensible has already, many times over, been excellently expressed—and expressed in vain. And note how well-hidden, pushed into obscurity, drowned by triviality's overwhelming mass—therefore, how important it is that the sensible be repeated again and again, experienced in new individuals over and over with new variations, with a new emphasis, in a new voice—continuously kept alive.”

“Whose is the world? Whose is thought? His who loves them.”