He who rejoices even at the stake triumphs not over pain but over the absence of pain where he had anticipated feeling it. A parable.

Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.

The lie is a condition of life.

We laugh at a man who, stepping out of his room at the very minute when the sun is rising, says, “It is my will that the sun shall rise”; or at him who, unable to stop a wheel, says, “I wish it to roll”; or, again, at him who, thrown in a wrestling match, says, “Here I lie, but here I wish to lie.” But, joking apart, do we not act like one of these three persons whenever we use the expression “I wish”?

Everywhere resoundeth the voices of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached.

In song and dance, man forgets how to walk and speak and is on the way into flying into the air, dancing... his very gestures express enchantment.

Only as an aesthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity.