The great advantage in noble parentage is that enables one to endure poverty more easily.
When the gratitude that many owe to one discards all modesty, then there is fame.
For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.
Comparing man and woman on the whole, one may say: woman would not possess a genius for ornamentation if she did not also possessan instinct for the secondary role.
Men seldom persevere in a vocation unless they believe or can convince themselves that it is fundamentally more important than anyother calling. Women are the same with their lovers.
Some men have sighed over the abduction of their wives, but many more have sighed because no one wanted to abduct theirs.
Men subsequently put whatever is newly learned or experienced to use as a plowshare, perhaps even as a weapon: but women immediately include it among their ornaments.
Men are cowards when it comes to the “eternally feminine”: and the little women know it.
Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.
Life is fountain of joy; but where the rabble also gather to drink, all wells are poisoned.
The higher its type, the more rarely a thing succeeds.
We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.
Modern marriage has lost its meaning – consequently it is being abolished.
The child as a monument to the passion of two people; the will to oneness in two.
Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.
We pay dearly for immortality: we die for it more than once during our lifetimes.
He who seeks intelligence lacks intelligence.
The wittiest authors evoke a barely perceptible smile.
Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.
Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!