The will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world.

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.

Whoever does not know how to find the way to his ideal lives more frivolously and impudently than the man without an ideal.

Some people do not become thinkers simply because their memories are too good.

The truth is ugly: we have art so as not to perish from the truth.

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.