It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.

Not with wrath do we kill, but with laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes.

For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goeth he willingly over the bridge.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.