The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes.
As a result, nature is something entirely different from what comes to mind when we invoke its name.
The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies.
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year – ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge – and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery.
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable.
That roguish and cheerful vice, politeness.
One must never have spared oneself, one must have acquired hardness as a habit to be cheerful and in good spirits in the midst of nothing but hard truths.
Assuming that he believes at all, the everyday Christian is a pitiful figure, a man who really cannot count up to three, and who besides, precisely because of his mental incompetence, would not deserve such a punishment as Christianity promises him.
A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity.
The surest aid in combating the male’s disease of self-contempt is to be loved by a clever woman.
One begins to mistrust very clever people when they become embarrassed.
Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes.
The bite of conscience, like the bite of a dog into a stone, is a stupidity.
What I understand by “philosopher”: a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.
Morality in Europe today is herd-morality.
In constructing concepts, we overlook the fact that no two things are the same. There is no such thing as the concept of a leaf, only billions and billions of leaves.
I do not give alms; I am not poor enough for that.
Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.
Physician, help yourself: thus help your patient too. Let this be his best help: that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself.
Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed – it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men, who call into question and poison most dangerously our trust in life, in man, and in ourselves.