All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?
It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.
What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
There are slavish souls who carry their appreciation for favors done them so far that they strangle themselves with the rope of gratitude.
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.
Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.
In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present.
This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.
He who laughs best today, will also laughs last.
Whoever has witnessed another’s ideal becomes his inexorable judge and as it were his evil conscience.
If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.
No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant.
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.