Brave people may be persuaded to an action by representing it as being more dangerous than it really is.

The will to incessant creation is vulgar, betraying jealousy, envy, and ambition. Assuming that you are something, there is really nothing that you need to do-and yet you do a great deal. Above the "productive" man there is still a higher type.

It is thus only this personal feeling of misery that we get rid of by acts of pity.

Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.