One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

We think that play and fairytales belong to childhood - how shortsighted that is! As though we would want at any time in our life to live without play and fairytales! We give these things other names, to be sure, and feel differently about them, but precisely this is the evidence that they are the same things, for the child too regards play as his work and fairy tales as his truth. The brevity of life ought to preserve us from a pedantic division of life into different stages - as though each brought something new.

The love of one sole being is a barbarism; for it will be employed to the detriment of all the rest. So too the love of God.

My formula for happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

What makes one heroic? - Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.