- Josef Breuer: How could I have given up everything?
- Nietzsche: You'd given up everything long before you met me.
- Josef Breuer: Yes, but now I have nothing.
- Nietzsche: Nothing *is* everything. In order to grow strong, you must first sink your roots deep into nothingness. Learn to face your loneliest loneliness.
- Josef Breuer: I often think of ending my life.
- Nietzsche: I cannot help you with this. I have no training.
- Josef Breuer: Who is trained? Such healing is not part of the medical discipline.
- Nietzsche: What do I know of this?
- Josef Breuer: You know more than any man alive. Aren't your books entire treatises on despair?
- Nietzsche: I can't cure despair. I only know how to tolerate it.
- Josef Breuer: [despondently about a patient] I left her weakened. Crippled.
- Nietzsche: You are responsible for all of your thoughts and deeds, but she, by virtue of this so-called illness, she is exonerated for everything? Who has damaged whom? Who has weakened whom? Doesn't this crippled person, as you call her, have greater power over you?
- Nietzsche: Tell me about you illness.
- Josef Breuer: Would it be more efficient to read my previous consultations?
- Nietzsche: I'm sure they're excellent physicians, thank you. But I make my own diagnosis before reviewing those of my colleagues, just as I prefer to see a play before reading the reviews.
- Josef Breuer: I should have been I before I became we!
- Mathilda: Words, words, Josef, you cannot live in words!
- Nietzsche: He's looking into the horror of his existence. He is encountering times, devout angels... but he sees too much. His insignificance, this mere little speck. There he is. And now his fear becomes so raw that he welcomes lust into his mind. And he stops looking into this chasm, and he begins to spend his time recollecting these miracles as how this little crippled person moves her legs, her lips, and her arms, and her breasts. And his mind, which was built for the noblest of ideas, becomes clogged now, with trash.
- Nietzsche: It's the first time I've revealed my loneliness, it's melting. It's melting away.
- Josef Breuer: It's a paradox. Isolation exists only in isolation. When shared it evaporates. My dear friend...
- Nietzsche: We *are* friends. I like saying that.
- [welling up]
- Nietzsche: No one ever said this to me.
- Josef Breuer: I am a scientist yet science has no colour. I need passion. I need magic. That's what Berthe represents. Life without passion, without mystery... who can live such a life?
- Lou Salome: Fascinating lecture to fall on so few ears. Why are people so afraid of you, Professor?
- Nietzsche: Oh, Truth is a fearsome thing.
- Lou Salome: Why do you say, 'God is dead', and not that He never existed?
- Nietzsche: What do you think?
- Lou Salome: That God has ceased to be a reckoning force in people's lives.
- Nietzsche: An interesting interpretation.
- Lou Salome: But if God is dead, then everything is permissible. No morals, no rules. Without God, who will organise our society? What is the solution to your 'Godless' proposition?
- Nietzsche: [laughs] Well, from what stars have we dropped down to each other here?
- [kisses her hand]
- Nietzsche: Auf wiedersehen!
- Josef Breuer: You write that your mission is to save humankind from illusion, and aimlessness... to create a new code of behaviour, a new morality free from superstition. It's all there! In your books...
- [first lines]
- Lou Salome: [writing a letter] Dr. Breuer, I must see you on a matter of life or death. Meet at nine tomorrow morning, at the Cafe Rousse.