Solitude makes us tougher towards ourselves and tenderer towards others. In both ways it improves our character.

The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed ? the deed is everything.

Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Never to talk about oneself is a very refined form of hypocrisy.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence.