It is not when it is dangerous to tell the truth that its advocates are hardest to find, but when it is boring.
Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.
Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom – it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.
Look not into the sun! Even the moon is too bright for your nocturnal eyes!
What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.
The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin.
The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive – signs of vulgarity!
On every parable you ride to every truth.
At the very moment when someone is beginning to take philosophy seriously, the whole world believes the opposite.
The Greeks, with their truly healthy culture, have once and for all justified philosophy simply by having engaged in it, and having engaged in it more fully than any other people.
This is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it sets but one task for each of us: to further the production of the philosopher, of the artist, and of the saint within us and outside us, and thereby to work at the consummation of nature.
Can an ass be tragic? – To perish under a burden that one can neither bear nor cast off? The case of the philosopher.
My philosophy is inverted Platonism: the further a thing is from true being, the purer, the lovelier, the better it is. Living inillusion as a goal!
We can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a way that the whole world cries out in contradiction: namely, when we are not speaking to the whole world.
What is life? A continuous praise and blame.
Where I found the living, there I found the will to power; even in the will of servants I found the will to be master.
Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own torment it increases its own knowledge. Did you already know that?
Among austere men intimacy involves shame – and is something precious.
However closely people are attached to one another, their mutual horizon nonetheless includes all four compass directions, and nowand again they notice it.
The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble inreading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them.