From passions grow opinions; intellectual laziness lets these harden into convictions.

Free from what? What does that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall your eye show to me: free for what?

All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'

To do great things is difficult; but to command great things is more difficult.

The woman and the genius do not work. Up to now, woman has been mankind's supreme luxury. In all those moments when we do our best, we do not work. Work is merely a means to these moments.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.