The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. It stands or falls with faith in God.

He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? ... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

The wheel and the brake have different duties, but also one in common: to hurt one another.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.