Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself, is a slave.
Contentment preserves one from catching cold. Has a woman who knew that she was well dressed ever caught a cold? No, not even when she had scarcely a rag on her back.
He who denies himself much in great matters will readily indulge himself in small things.
The love of indulgence is rooted in the depths of a man’s heart. His soul would prefer to share the excessive and unrestrained; but his soul cannot love.
How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity.
Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.- Every word is a prejudice.
The reasons for which ‘this’ world has been characterized as ‘apparent’ are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
In the stream.- Mighty waters draw much stone and rubble along with them; mighty spirits many stupid and bewildered heads.
When asses are needed.- You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass.
The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us – in order to deceive ourselves.
It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!
Another Christian concept, no less crazy, has passed even more deeply into the tissue of modernity: the concept of the ‘equality of souls before God.’ This concept furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights...
No more fiction, for now we calculate; but that we may calculate, we had to make fiction first.
Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.
I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because I can no longer believe in you.
In intercourse with scholars and artists one readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds: in a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man; and often, even in a mediocre artist, one finds a very remarkable man.
He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.
The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of the doer.
It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan litanies, moral sermons, and goody goodness won’t chime.
The code of Manu differs from the bible. By means of it the nobles, the philosophers, and the warriors keep the whip hand over the majority. It is full of noble valuations; it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life.