One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

I have never come across someone who could inspire more respect than the Greek philosophers.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober--this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.