What convinces is not necessarily true-it is merely convincing: a note for asses.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

Enduring habits I hate.... Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits.

And this do I call immaculate perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.

The most unequivocal sign of contempt for man is to regard everybody merely as a means to one's own ends, or of no account whatever.