There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, and, of its many rungs, three are the most important. People used to make human sacrifices to their god, perhaps even sacrificing those they loved the best ... Then, during the moral epoch of humanity, people sacrificed the strongest instincts they had, their 'nature,' to their god... Finally: what was left to be sacrificed? ... Didn't people have to sacrifice God himself and worship rocks, stupidity, gravity, fate, or nothingness out of sheer cruelty to themselves?

When asses are needed.- You will never get the crowd to cry Hosanna until you ride into town on an ass.

You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

... hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good - a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! - As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered.

So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is Truth?

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.