Thus strength is afforded by good and thorough customs, thus is learnt the subjection of the individual, and strenuousness of character becomes a birth gift and afterwards is fostered as a habit.
He who recites dramatic works makes discoveries about his own character.
Every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for master-ship.
The parasites live where the great have little secret sores.
Whoever gives advice to a sick person acquires a feeling of superiority over him, whether the advice be accepted or rejected.
Insects sting, not from malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics; they desire our blood not our pain.
To be moral, correct, and virtuous is to be obedient to an old established law and custom.
We become aware, however, that all customs, even the hardest, grow pleasanter and milder with time, and that the severest way of life may become a habit and therefore a pleasure.
An important species of pleasure, and therewith the source of morality, arises out of habit.
Compulsion precedes morality, indeed morality itself is compulsion for a time, to which one submits for the avoidance of pain.
Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.
It has therewith come to be recognized that the history of moral valuations is at the same time the history of an error, the error of responsibility, which is based upon the error of the freedom of will.
Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth.
Without passions you have no experience whatever.
Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.
The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate.
Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion that it is in their power to make a man happy.
We are more pained when one of our friends is guilty of something shameful than when we do it ourselves.
The Refinement of Shame. People are not ashamed to think something foul, but they are ashamed when they think these foul thoughts are attributed to them.
One unconsciously takes it for granted that doer and sufferer think and feel alike, and according to this supposition we measure the guilt of the one by the pain of the other.