Everything that is profound loves the mask: the profoundest things have a hatred even of figure and likeness.
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other emotions.
Solitude makes us tougher towards ourselves and tenderer towards others. In both ways it improves our character.
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Liberalism is the transformation of mankind into cattle.
Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.
Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.
We must be physicists in order to be creative since so far codes of values and ideals have been constructed in ignorance of physics or even in contradiction to physics.
The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished – it is no longer secure in its instincts.
Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!
We are doubly willing to jump into the water after some one who has fallen in, if there are people present who have not the courage to do so.
Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.
Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.
Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.
If we lacked curiosity, we should do less for the good of our neighbor. But, under the name of duty or pity, curiosity steals into the home of the unhappy and the needy. Perhaps even in the famous mother-love there is a good deal of curiosity.
One should part from life as Odysseus parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it.
Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody’s equal.
The earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.
If you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good.