A small revenge is more human than no revenge at all.

The domestication (the culture) of man does not go deep--where it does go deep it at once becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The 'savage' (or, in moral terms, the evil man) is a return to nature--and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from 'culture'.

What I understand by "philosopher": a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.

If thinking is your fate, revere this fate with divine honour and sacrifice to it the best, the most beloved

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.