Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the force and will to inflict great pain?

A sure way to irritate people and to put evil thoughts into their heads is to keep them waiting a long time. This makes them immoral.

All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what there is to love in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.

Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race.