If we have injured someone, giving him the opportunity to make a joke about us is often enough to provide him personal satisfaction, or even to win his good will.
A vocation makes us unthinking; that is its greatest blessing. For it is a bulwark behind which we are permitted to withdraw whencommonplace doubts and cares assail us.
The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.
Immortal is the moment when I engendered the recurrence. For the sake of this moment I bear the recurrence.
The more a person indulges himself the less others are willing to indulge him.
Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.
Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.
We must repay goodness and wickedness: but why exactly to the person who has done us a good or a wicked turn?
Whoever turns away from us might not offend us in doing so perhaps, but he certainly offends our followers.
To our strongest impulse, to the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience yields.
Rash actions are seldom committed in isolation. With the first rash action we always do too much. So we usually go on to commit asecond one – and then we do too little.
What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just that shall man be for the superman: a laughing-stockor a painful embarrassment.
We attack not only to hurt someone, to defeat him, but perhaps also simply to become conscious of our own strength.
Nothing can be done about it: every master has but a single pupil – and he will not stay loyal to him – for he is also destined to become a master.
Mastery has been achieved when one neither makes a mistake nor hesitates in the performance.
There is always a certain noise in applause: even in the applause we give ourselves.
I can still stand on life’s narrowest footing: but who would I be were I to show you this art. Would you like to see a ropedancer?
The object of convalescence ought to be to turn our attention to life: at other times, simply to our tasks!
Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.
We evaluate the services that anyone renders to us according to the value he puts on them, not according to the value they have for us.