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They may or may not be the most important passages by Nietzsche. But I certainly love the following few in his Book Four of The Gay Science.

Star friendship.— We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred! There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path,—let us rise up to this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility.— Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

Preparatory human beings — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honour to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age will carry heroism into the search of knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences. For this end we now need many preparatory courageous human being who cannot very well leap out of nothing, any more than out of the sand and slime of present-day civilization and metropolitanism -- human beings who know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content and constant in invisible activities; human beings who are bent on seeking all things for what in them must be overcome; human beings ditinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity in vicotory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; human beings whose judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and fame is sharp and free; human beings with their own festivals, their own working days, and their own period of mourning, accustomed to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey when that is called for -- to live dangerously! Build your city on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ship into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourself! Be robers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowlege! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in the forests like shy deer. At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due; it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

Brief habits.— I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses; my nature is designed entirely for brief habits, even in the needs of my physical health and altogether as far as I can see at all: from the lowest to the highest. I always believe that this will give me lasting satisfaction now—brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity—and that I am envied for having found and recognized it:—and now it nourishes me at noon and in the evening and spreads a deep contentment all around itself and deep into me so that I desire nothing else, without having any need for comparisons, contempt or hatred. And one day its time is up: the good things part from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me—but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it, and as if we had reason to be grateful to each other and thus we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and lifestyles.— Enduring habits I hate, and I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and that the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits: for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people, a permanent domicile, or unique good health. 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.— Most intolerable, to be sure, really terrible, would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation:—that would be my exile and my Siberia.

For more from the book: http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/diefrohl7.htm