The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.

The vanity of others runs counter to our taste only when it runs counter to our vanity.

Everywhere resoundeth the voices of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached.