Happiness is a fata morgana. the only way to not end up unhappy is to not long for happiness.

The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.

So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!

Not to him who is offensive to us are we most unfair, but to him who doth not concern us at all.

One must first be firmly set in oneself, one must stand securely on one's own two legs otherwise one cannot love at all.

Men are cowards when it comes to the "eternally feminine": and the little women know it.

Since Copernicus, man seems to have got himself on an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and faster away from the center into-what? into nothingness? into a 'penetrating sense of his nothingness?' ... all science, natural as well as unnatural-which is what I call the self-critique of knowledge-has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been but a piece of bizarre conceit.